Visitors to Yadegar Asisi’s ‘Dresden 1945’ installation at the Panometer in Dresden in January 2015
Dresden, the Fire and the Darkness, Sinclair McKay, Viking, 2020
LESLIE JONES revisits the Dresden raid of February 1945
“Man is at bottom a savage, horrible beast” (Arthur Schopenhauer)
Historian James Holland, a ubiquitous presence on television programmes about World War 2 these days, featured in Lost Home Movies of Nazi Germany. In the undated footage in question, a group of Jews are being deported from Dresden. Holland confides that he had always considered the city “an innocent place”, bombed needlessly in February 1945. But having watched this amateur film, he reminds us that it was also a rail hub with over 140 factories producing war material. For example, from 1942 the Zeiss Ikon camera plant produced precision instruments and optical technology for the military. It employed slave labour, including Jewish women. In this “hotbed of Nazism”, Holland maintains, the Jews were dealt with as brutally as anywhere in Germany. He acknowledges, however, that the Dresden firestorm was “horrendous”, something of an understatement.
In Greatest Events of World War 2 – Dresden Firestorm, Holland returned to this contentious subject. He referred to the German air raids on England, notably those on London and Coventry but conceded that in all of these attacks, ‘only’ 40,000 people were killed. Dresden suffered more losses between the 13th and 15th of February. Holland blames the Nazi authorities in Dresden, notably the Gauleiter of Saxony, Martin Mutschmann (‘King Mu’), for failing to build air raid shelters for the civilian population (but not for himself).
In his review of David Irving’s The Destruction of Dresden (1963), Harold Nicolson, like Holland, conflates the Dresden raid and the Shoah, calling the former “…the single greatest holocaust caused by the war”. In Dresden, the Fire and the Darkness, in similar vein, Sinclair McKay notes that bomber crew survivors were proud of their service, as they considered Nazism “a tumour…[that] could not be cut out without damage to the surrounding flesh”. Or, put otherwise, they were “simply doing what they were told”.
Apropos the morality of incinerating 25,000 virtually defenceless civilians (there were no anti-aircraft guns or searchlights in Dresden by this time) McKay contends that the concept of a “war crime” implies “intentionality and rational decision-making”. He suggests, accordingly, that “these city bombings were not vengeful or consciously merciless” but “desperate reflexive attacks launched to make the other side simply stop”. War, he avers, creates its own momentum, its own desperate logic.
McKay evidently sympathises with Air Chief Marshal Harris’ contention that the Nazis were a fanatical enemy that “could be vanquished only by the trauma of complete, civic obliteration…” (McKay, p 20). He concedes, however, that Harris hated the Germans and was indifferent to the fate of German civilians. His sole concern was the heavy losses of airmen in Bomber Command. Four out of every ten bomber airmen were killed, wounded or taken prisoner. Any distinction between military and civilian targets was superseded by the concept of total war, as espoused by Harris, Churchill and his scientific adviser Lord Cherwell.
Dresden, the Fire and the Darkness is replete with graphic and compelling details about the raid. The author tells us that at the zoo, “the elephants bellowed and the gibbons chattered in wild distress”; that people’s shoes melted and their clothes self-combusted; that bodies of pregnant women were torn open to reveal unborn children; that in the Great Garden, body parts hung from trees but that elsewhere, they were sent skywards; and that after the raid, “distressed ownerless dogs” kept people awake at night.
The author endeavours to contextualise or relativise the effects of carpet/area bombing (or “worker de-housing”) by dwelling on the undoubted fear experienced by bomber air crews and on the persecution of the Jews. But German historian Sönke Neitzel is correct when he asserts that the objective of terror attacks, like the one on Dresden commencing on the night of February 13, was to kill as many civilians as possible in order to hinder troop movements and to paralyse infrastructure and industry.
In the British press, the Dresden raid was presented as an attempt to help Marshal Ivan Konev’s advancing forces. At the Yalta Conference, Stalin’s commanders had asked the Anglo-Americans to target Dresden, a transport hub. But, in the event, the Germans did not buckle. Stories of rape and mutilation by the advancing Red Armies were rife and encouraged German soldiers to fight on. A PR disaster in the neutral press, the destruction of Dresden enabled Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels to momentarily occupy the moral high ground.
Equivocation and jesuitry aside, Dresden, the Fire and the Darkness is unquestionably well written. The memoirs and diaries of those who survived the ordeal, notably the diary of Victor Klemperer, the former Professor of Philology and Romance Studies at the Technical University of Dresden, enliven the narrative. McKay evidently understands why the “German Florence”, with its fine art and architecture, was so treasured by its citizens. As he remarks, “To each and every Dresdener, the city had a unique and perhaps sacred beauty”. And, in due course, every citizen of Dresden also understood “the terrible fragility of historic beauty” (McKay, ‘Why the Dresden bombers weren’t war criminals’, The Telegraph, 13th February 2020).
Small Men on the Wrong Side of History –The Decline, Fall, and Unlikely Return of Conservatism, Ed West, London, Constable, 2020, 426 pages
DEREK TURNER likes a conservative critique of conservatism
The story of conservatism since 1945 has been one of failure wrapped up in frequent electoral success. While anatomising this oft-noted conundrum, Ed West outlines excellently the intellectual and stylistic differences between Left and Right, before concluding ruefully that the forces of conservatism are unlikely to regroup, let alone regain lost ground.
Politics is about ideas, morals, and practicality. It is also about radically oppositional personality types, reflected in culture and possibly rooted in neurobiology, which govern our aesthetics and outlooks, and compel us to choose sides in a culture clash that has been continuing since the Greeks dreamed up Cassandra and Pandora. Cassandra is an archetypal ‘conservative’, and Pandora the original ‘liberal’ – the former eternally seeking grounds for gloom, the latter reasons to hope. The author is instinctively in the Cassandran camp, although many of his allies are almost as little to his taste as the myrmidons of the other side.
West is the son of two conservative journalists, Mary Kenny and the late Richard West, and the brother of another (Patrick). Sometimes sympathies run in families, almost as persistently as physical features. Now in early middle age, West finds himself turning into his father, a man so reactionary he didn’t learn to drive, and spoiled his ballot papers. He was brought up in ‘bohemian conservative’ circumstances in London, encountering eccentrics like the buckled shoe and monocle-wearing French priest, ‘aristocratic-looking’ descendant of a palace guard killed during the Revolution, who called France the ‘regicide state’.
The broad-minded author loathes the limited philosophy expressed by British tabloids, climate change deniers, conspiracy theorists, Creationists, identitarians, incels, Objectivists, populists, ‘shock jocks’, Trump, or UKIP, all of whom he thinks make the Right much uglier than it ought to be. The American thinker Sam Francis famously called the Republican Party ‘beautiful losers’; West would dispute that ‘beautiful’. But however abysmal his opinion of many on the Right, his opinion of the alternative is lower yet. Union Jack waistcoat-wearers et al are embarrassments, but they’re his embarrassments.
He broods on the diminishing socioeconomic status of the Right’s supporters. The erstwhile party of the influential rich now draws ever-growing allegiance from the lower middle and working classes. The author favours uplift, and realises that the rough auxiliaries who founded his Europe of the faith were as unvarnished as today’s Trumpians, living in their centuries’ equivalents of Flyover Country. But short-term electoral success may entail longer-term irrelevance. Conservatism is retreating into older age-groups, less wealthy suburbs, left-behind towns and backwoods, while Leftists consolidate their control of the institutions that set agendas and the metropolises forming the future. They are assailed as ‘elitists’, and they are – but elitism is always more a help than a hindrance. Faiths, like fashions, filter downwards – and today’s minority opinion is often the mainstream view of tomorrow, with which the day-after-tomorrow’s conservatives will probably play catch-up.
It is a cultural commonplace that conservatives are boring, dim-witted, morally inferior and repressed. Sometimes, they even see themselves in such lights, leading them either to avoid engagement (except in the ballot box, whose ‘shy Tories’ surprise psephologists), or adopt perverse positions at least partly to provoke. Some Rightists actually are, as Barack Obama remarked of Al-Qaida, ‘small men on the wrong side of history’, overcompensating for existential fear with intemperate anger. Where Conservatives do cling on in prominent positions, they are imperilled islands, like Catholic recusants in the days of Dissolution.
5th century BC Attic vase depiction of Pandora (centre)
The Cassandra-Pandora dichotomy has reproduced itself in reality. In countless contretemps, conservatives have found themselves on history’s back foot, fighting implacable opponents with a gallantry touching because ultimately unavailing. The humorous 1930 classic, 1066 And All That, summarised one emblematic Left-Right confrontation – ‘The Roundheads were right, but repulsive. The Cavaliers were wrong, but romantic’. Today’s Right has been robbed not just of victory, but even of romance, its adherents now and retrospectively regarded as ‘phobes’ and rubes, carriers of contagions and false consciousness. Old icons have been pushed from the pantheon, as saints’ faces were scratched from medieval rood-screens – chivalry, Church, femininity, hierarchy, masculinity, monarchy, nation, race – and colourless, country-less, ‘rational’, sexless idols have taken their place on the shockingly bare plinths. This is the cruellest of outcomes for instinctive conservatives, who privately revel in ruination, so long as they can gild their myriad ‘lost causes’ with mythic lustre.
The Right’s old emphases on duty, emotional restraint, experience and realism are intrinsically less appealing than the Left’s freedom, novelty and utopianism. It is the perennial difference between Augustine and Pelagius, Burke and Rousseau, a Pope and a Pentecostalist, Churchill’s funeral and Diana’s, Margaret Thatcher and Michelle Obama, a soldier and a singer, a coat of arms and a rainbow flag. On what psychologists call ‘the Big Five personality traits’, Rightists score highest only on conscientiousness, leaving Leftists to lay claim to agreeableness, extroversion and openness. They also score more highly on the last trait, neuroticism, which they display abundantly on Twitter. They burnish their reputation endlessly through their dominance in academia, the arts, and the broadcast media. Conservatives wind up on the ‘wrong side of history’, because they rarely write histories – while, as Shelley noted hopefully, ‘Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.’ Often, the Right has good ideas, badly presented, and the Left bad ones, imaginatively expressed.
Leftists also practise solidarity. Strangely for those who so stress freedom, Leftists are frequently herd animals. They appoint and promote allies, decline to denounce each other, and ignore their side’s crimes while exaggerating those of the Right. There is even de facto ‘discipline’ through the antifa fringe, who routinely subject outspoken Rightists to ‘deplatforming’, ‘doxxing’, vandalism, and violence. To Leftists, political parties are communal, almost covenanting organisations – while for conservatives, parties are just means to an (indefinite) end. Everything, to true-believing Leftists, is political, while conservatives are usually content to expostulate, before abandoning events to individuals, or Fate. Individualism extends to the Right’s farthest fringe; while the Left has goon-squads, the most lethal terrorists of recent times have been lone wolf Rightists.
Another difficulty is that the conservative worldview is not reducible to simple statements, and varies between countries. It is an essence, not a set of rigid and (supposedly) universal ideas that even children can comprehend. Leftist values can be summed up (and have been consciously) in Sesame Street, Star Trek, and Harry Potter – and inculcation continues as those children graduate to Ibsen, Harper Lee, Margaret Atwood, Mad Men, or stand-up comedians. It matters hugely that women are increasingly un-conservative, as it is usually women who set a household’s moral tone. Young people no longer rove rightwards with age, if they ever did in recent decades.
The author enjoys puncturing priggish pretensions, while admitting to inconsistencies in his own argument. He combines the ancients and obvious authorities (Burke, Kirk, and Oakeshott) with moderns like John Derbyshire, segueing skilfully from classics to pop culture, neo-reaction, and social media folk-tales. It seems a pity to cavil with so likeable a contribution to the corpus, but arguably he is overly fastidious – for instance, ridiculing those who are fixated on the Frankfurt School, before admitting it really was influential. He asserts dubiously that Germany and Israel have ‘found inner peace’ after World War Two. He claims ‘memes…are perhaps the first art form in two hundred years in which the Right has excelled’, somehow overlooking Céline, Joyce, Marinetti, Pound, Yeats, and others. He disagrees with von Krafft-Ebing’s (surely incontrovertible) assertion that self-mortifying saints may have had masochistic urges.
Eventually, he undercuts his own side – a tradition in itself among conservative commentators. According to this desponding analysis, there is almost certainly no salvation in politics, and all that remains is retreat into religion. But this is unfeasible, and even if it wasn’t it wouldn’t alter much, because as he observes, ‘progressivism is a heresy of Christianity’ – albeit lacking Christianity’s charity, culture, humility, and transcendental quality. There were good reasons why the Romans tried to repress the upstart faith, with its imperially unsettling equality, eschatology, free will, individualism, ostentatious piety, sentimentality, and universalism (and sentimentality’s obverse, bitter hatreds of ‘heretics’).
Probably his resignation is born more of private diffidence than public despair, because, as he shows, liberalism is vulnerable – embedded for so long it is atrophying, its yawn-inducing clichés eliciting counter-rebellion among the least ‘awokened’ most awake. It has listened only to itself for so long that many of its members are automata, like the ‘non-player characters’ in Dungeons & Dragons. As the West shrivels, liberalism is becoming a luxury even liberals can’t afford – and their vapid ideas of identity politics will be overtaken by earthier, older variants. Where conservatives prove unequal, new parties will emerge, with more determined and lateral-thinking leaders, who understand metapolitics, and pay attention to presentation. These mightn’t all call themselves conservative, but on the other hand they might actually conserve.
DEREK TURNER is the editor of The Brazen Head, as well as a novelist (A Modern Journey, Displacement, and Sea Changes) and widely-published reviewer. His first non-fiction book, Edge of England: Landfall in Lincolnshire, was published June 2022. Some of his writing may be found at www.derek-turner.com He is also on X – @derekturner1964
LENNART SVENSSON is best known for his biography of Ernst Jünger (Ernst Jünger: A Portrait, 2014) and his philosophy of life, Actionism (2017). He has also published novels such as Redeeming Lucifer (2017) and he’s currently working on new projects, both fact and fiction. He was born in Sweden in 1965 and still lives there. You can visit his Amazon page here
Mountain preaching
I am standing on the mountain preaching, having the whole world in my hand.
I am the last court of appeal of truth in the pale-arctic zone and beyond.
I am the black rider, white rider, red rider, pale rider –
Seeing a world go up in flames, seeing rivers of blood…
Seeing crystals and magnets levitate us to a new splendour…
+++
I am the angel announcing good news. I am wonderful counsellor, mighty god, everlasting father, prince of peace. I live in a palace of gold on the bottom of the sea, seeing the sunrise through the waters, praising that glaucous dawn –
LENNART SVENSSON is best known for his biography of Ernst Jünger (Ernst Jünger: A Portrait, 2014) and his philosophy of life, Actionism (2017). He has also published novels such as Redeeming Lucifer (2017) and is currently working on new projects, both fact and fiction. He was born in Sweden in 1965 and still lives there. You can visit his Amazon page here
IVAN HEAD was born in Perth, Western Australia in 1953. Participation in Speech and Drama led him to read, learn and recite poetry from an early age. He has been writing poetry for most of his adult life and regularly reviews poetry publications for Quadrant, the Australian journal founded by James McAuley in the mid-1950s. He has a PhD from Glasgow University on the interpretation of miracle stories, and was a philosophy major from the university of Western Australia. Ivan was head (Warden) of two Australian university colleges for 27 years
IVAN HEAD was born in Perth, Western Australia in 1953. Participation in Speech and Drama led him to read, learn and recite poetry from an early age. He has been writing poetry for most of his adult life and regularly reviews poetry publications for Quadrant, the Australian journal founded by James McAuley in the mid-1950s. He has a PhD from Glasgow University on the interpretation of miracle stories, and was a philosophy major from the university of Western Australia. Ivan was head (Warden) of two Australian university colleges for 27 years
Not much is known about MARCUS BALES except he lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio, USA, and his work has not appeared in Poetry or The New Yorker. His latest book is 51 Poems; reviews and information at http://tinyurl.com/jo8ek3r
Paris and Helen
Perhaps the April sun shone every day
And I do not remember. Did the rain
Exclude us from our choice out-door café
While through the glass we watched it spot the Seine?
Not much is known about MARCUS BALES, except he lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio, USA, and his work has not appeared in Poetry or The New Yorker. His latest book is 51 Poems; reviews and information at http://tinyurl.com/jo8ek3r
STODDARD MARTIN traces the connections and contrasts of two utterly different Americans
George Santayana and Ezra Pound would have known of one another for decades before they ever corresponded, let alone met. Twenty-two years apart in age, they were at least a generation distant in sensibility and more than that in temperament. But Santayana was a poet at heart, if a philosopher in the world, and Pound a poet in the world, if philosopher at heart. Both were mainly products of the American northeast, though neither was born there. Both were dropouts from academia and expatriates in Europe for much of their life, principally and finally in Italy. Santayana ended in a modest room in a convent in Rome under the care of the Little Sisters of Mary, Pound in a workman’s cottage in a relative backwater of Venice under the care of the mother of his daughter Mary.
T. S. Eliot had studied under Santayana at Harvard, and Santayana’s protégé Daniel Cory attended Pound’s Ezuversity in Rapallo in the early 1930s. The former may have provided a link between Pound and Santayana in thought, the latter would in person. A general impression had formed for each of the other before association. In 1928 we find Santayana, living in Paris, writing to a young man who has sent him some sonnets:
I have just been reading hard words written by Mr Ezra Pound on the subject of the sonnets in The Dial for this month [i]
He praises the young man for aperçus shared with Homer but chastises him for “rebelling” against his chosen form’s strict tradition of ten syllables per line. The letter continues:
Unless you can say these things better than Homer and company people will prefer to read about them in them rather than in you
It concludes:
Words, words, words are the foundation of everything – in literature. If you feel the force of each word, and its penumbra of association, the rest will take care of itself, and if ever you have anything to say, it will say itself for you magnificently
It is intriguing to speculate that this judgement may have been stimulated by Pound as much as by its recipient. Santayana’s last sentence suggests respect for an imagist method, but his view of a modernist treatment of Homer is ominous. He seems to be developing a response to a modernist aesthetic akin to Pound’s at this stage; later he will be more specific. In 1935 he writes to a young woman who has sent him her collection, praising her for “freedom from religion”, a “clear view of truth” and “naturalism” [ii]. As to her free verse, he cites Pound’s Quia Pauper Amavi, which he’s been reading:
You would deceive nobody into mistaking you for a real modern. Though your restrained voice may not attract attention so scandalously [as Pound’s], I am sure that you will give more pleasure to those who do hear you, and will be more gratefully received
Ouch. The versifier of the 1890s clearly finds it hard to adjust to what a new age is up to.
In 1936 Santayana writes to another admirer about Faulkner’s Sanctuary:
Like all these recent writers, the author is too lazy and self-indulgent and throws off what comes to him in a sort of dream, expecting the devoted reader to run about after him, sniffing at all the droppings of his mind. I am not a psychological dog and require my dog biscuit to be clearly set down for me in a decent plate with proper ceremony [iii]
Two months later, half-regretting his verdict, he qualifies it to the same recipient:
What I say about ‘droppings’ would be more applicable to other people – e.g. Ezra Pound – than to [Faulkner]
Ouch again. Such a reaction would not escape the courteous Santayana’s lips when he finally met Pound in 1939; but even given their frequent correspondence during the War, he could praise yet another young person who would send him unsolicited poems for not “threatening” his readers with
…the horror, for instance, of passing in Ezra Pound, who can write good verse, into the most vulgar journalese, and the most insolent irrelevance [iv]
That first meeting took place in Venice. Pound’s biographer David Moody records how Pound had written to Santayana, “whose clarity and integrity of mind he admired”, seeking “sidelights” on his “notes to [Guido] Cavalcanti (1) and one or two Chinese texts” [v]. They met at the Hotel Danieli, where the well-off philosopher liked to plant himself for a few weeks every year. Pound arrived with his 13 years-old daughter from her mother’s modest dwelling on the far side of the Grand Canal. Santayana, Pound would write to Eliot, “failed to see the connection” between Cavalcanti, Chinese ideograms and Scotus Erigena (2). Santayana for his part felt “talked at”, Moody surmises, and at one point he retaliated with a comment from The Education of Henry Adams which Pound would remember in Canto 74: “Teach? At Harvard?/Teach? It cannot be done”. Pound’s verdict on the visit, reported by his daughter years later, was that it was “a relief to talk philosophy with someone completely honest – a nice mind”.
Here we might pause to consider the social milieu. Santayana was not only well-off but well-connected. Less than a decade before, he had given away John D. Rockefeller’s favourite granddaughter in marriage to the Marquis de Cuevas when her father, Santayana’s dear friend the philosopher Charles Strong, failed to turn up [vi]. Santayana was of an echelon of American expatriate depicted in Henry James, whose brother William had been his instructor and colleague in the philosophy department at Harvard [vii]. A lifelong bachelor, Santayana was unencumbered by practicalities such as might interfere with aesthetic or intellectual pursuits. An admired stylist in English, he was also fluent in his native Spanish and French and to large extent Italian and German. Respected by almost all with whom he came into contact, he was belittled only by a few British empiricists such as Bertrand Russell – hardly a mark against him for the increasingly Anglophobic Pound. He was, in short, a character to appeal to the poet on many bases: American, expatriate, linguistic. He was also a socially desirable mark for an Idaho-Yankee arguably less secure in pedigree and definitely less so in income.
A crucial connective would be the War, during which both writers were essentially trapped in Italy [viii]. This was not wholly a matter of hardship: both were confirmed Italophiles, and Santayana at that time was politically indifferent as between liberal democracy and fascism. But everyone in situ in Italy at the time would share in the deprivation of heat and electricity and food as it grew, and Santayana’s chronic bronchitis worsened. What he and Pound had most in common perhaps was being cut off from funds in the UK and US and from ability to communicate with publishers. Santayana’s manuscripts had to be smuggled out to Scribner’s via the Vatican and the American embassy in Madrid. During this era, Pound was much in Rome, as we know, and visited the philosopher who, we are told, was
…impressed by Pound’s unusual appearance (his mass of frizzy red hair) and manner… Some of [his] letters, like his radio broadcasts for the Mussolini government, Santayana found incomprehensible
To Cory he would write in May ’41:
Pound was here yesterday, quite mad… Complains of people’s utter ignorance of economics, and says that it is the root of all trouble. And half his speech is indecipherable to me. I wonder if he is understood when he speaks through the radio. Why does he talk that way? Is it incapacity, or inspiration? Perhaps 9/10th the one and 1/10th the other
Such a critique is scarcely surprising. Santayana’s early writing on literature had attacked a vogue for Browning and Whitman in America of Pound’s youth.
It is a mere euphemism… to call this perpetual vagrancy a development of the soul… Crude experience is [its] only end, the endless struggle [its] only ideal… self-serving subjectivity… poetry of barbarism… stepchild of German romanticism and idealism [ix]
No fan of the transcendentalists, Santayana was in favour of objectivity vs. “emotional slither” and of an authorial use of personae to disguise personal “vent”. In such principles we may see elements of his later attraction to, bemusement by, and repulsion from Pound. “Santayana was capable of sensing danger where others felt only excitement” in the revolt against “old fogeyism in the Edwardian era”. Not for this patrician poet-philosopher to inveigh against effeminacy in American letters such as the author of Patria Mia would. Yet both had fled some tendency common to their formative tradition.
What brought them together was almost certainly one-sided: Pound’s desire for a grand old man’s imprimatur, as Moody implies. In an attempt to provide a pointer for the poet’s elusive paradiso, Santayana lent Pound a copy of his Realms of Spirit, fourth and most recently finished part of his magnum opus on religious impulses and much else. Evidently sceptical that Pound might actually read the book, Santayana writes in afterthought,
Please keep in mind that I don’t believe anything existent can be defined, only indicated; so that all sorts of different figures or words pointed at are better than any one name… Spirit is not an independent substance or centre with a persistent individuality: only a spark of light [x]
He goes on to report that he has been perusing a volume by the historian Brooks Adams, Henry’s racially biased brother, which Pound had apparently recommended to him, and states that he is disappointed by its “lack of philosophy”. Such flickers of incompatible mindset may be reflected in a paragraph Pound would insert a year later into one of his Rome Broadcasts, about Marx and materialism [xi]:
George Santayana calls himself a materialist. It rather shocked old William James. Ole William told young George, he was younger at that stage of world history, that his, Santayana’s philosophy was organized rottenness. I cannot agree with fuzzy old James. It appears to me that George Santayana rather agrees with Thomas Aquinas. I mean the materialist Santayana ends up by writin’ a book called The Realm of Spirit [sic]. I occasionally plunge into the work to calm my heated mind. I mean when I am not up to Confucius and Mencius. And Thomas Aquinas says somewhere that the soul is the first ACT of an organic body. Well, I ask George Santayana what THAT means. And he says entelechy, which seems to me to be dodgin’ behind a Greek word. But anyhow, a materialist definition of the soul seems to be that it is the first act, or first action, or first condition of an organic body. Don’t ASK me. I am merely trying to show how far the word or idea materialist can be stretched by people who play with abstractions
Santayana’s copy of Realms of Spirit, apparently his sole one, was never returned [xii] – lost in Pound’s flight following the fall of Rome, we assume, or during his later incarceration for treason. There is no clarity about how much Pound read of it or of Santayana’s earlier work, such as Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923), which might have contained much to Pound’s taste. Communication between the two broke off until May ’46, by which time Santayana was back in funds and being fêted for a novel and a fragment of autobiography which had become bestsellers in the United States as he shivered through to the War’s end. To Pound, now shut in but not shut up in a ward for the insane at St Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington D.C., he writes: “I am glad to hear directly from you” [xiii]. He goes on to discuss Pound’s Ballad of the Goodly Fere, which he caricatures as a picture of “Christ qua gangster [that] only makes me laugh”. This leads him to speculate that his own recent work on “the idea of Christ as pure spirit in the flesh… would perhaps turn your stomach.” Good-natured badinage, but not without spike. Shortly afterwards, Santayana asks his publisher to send Pound a copy of his book The Idea of Christ in the Gospels, which Pound has requested in a letter written “partly in Chinese characters” [xiv].
An individual of Santayana’s courtesy could not fail to respond to a fellow writer, especially one in trouble, but often it was not easy. A month after the preceding, we find him writing to Dorothy Pound thanking her for posting Ezra’s “letter telling me that p. 6 of my book had reconciled him to the frivolity of the rest.”[xv] “I have also received his new canto,” Santayana reports, “and should have written to him about it if a ray of light from it had been able to pierce my thick skull. But really I can’t catch the drift of his allusions.” He adds that Pound’s “subjectivity” resembles his own in his autobiographical People and Places, if at a distance. This remark seems motivated in part, if not all, by politesse. To his publisher, Cory and others he vents.
From Ezra Pound I continue to receive communications: the last was stark mad: a few scattered unintelligible abbreviations on a large sheet of paper, and nothing else. Yet the address, although fantastically scrawled, was quite correct and intelligible. His madness may be spasmodic only [xvi]
At around this time Santayana’s attention was drawn to Robert Lowell among young American poets, and he struck up a correspondence with him rivalling that with Cory. One of their first exchanges is about Pound. “I have received a letter of his”, Santayana tells Lowell,
…with a Chinese character in the middle of the page, and below, in ‘traditional’ English the maxim: ‘Respect the intelligence of a cherry that can make cherries.’ I am touched by his remembering me, as I have not answered one or two earlier letters that were wholly unintelligible [xvii]
In a subsequent letter he asks Lowell why Pound favours Propertius (3); this is in prelude to observing,
It is a pity that he prints so many mistakes in his foreign languages, even in the Greek alphabet. I thought some passages in these ‘Cantos’ [the Pisan] very good; but why so much trash? I must write to him [ xviii]
This about sums it up. Pound has a soupçon of recognisable quality for Santayana but is shoddy and unintelligible, and he would really prefer for the poet to take a hint and stop pestering him with missives, but then rather repents a lack of grace in the sentiment.
For one of Santayana’s fastidiousness, it boils down to taste. “I don’t agree in taste at all with Ezra Pound,” he remarks to another correspondent,
…whom Eliot (once a pupil of mine) thought the ‘best of workmen’, quoting Dante about the most artificially laboured of Provençal poets… Matters of taste are matters of sympathy [xix]
Rowing back again towards repentance, he adds that differences in taste are “not a sin”. To another correspondent in 1950 he complains of an article in The TLS alleging that “the chief benefit of Browning for our times” is that he “inspired the early poems of Pound” [xx]. “He, who was as good a dramatist as Shakespeare!” Santayana fumes in defence of a bard whom, as we have seen, he attacked roundly when an aspiring young poet. In a letter to his publisher about his own Christ book, Santayana varies the complaint, deploring that the work of Browning, which provides “a better (because more cheerful) moral guide than the Sermon on the Mount” should “survive only as a contributor to the poetry of Ezra Pound!” [xxi]
Santayana’s ill-temper may have been exacerbated by a concurrent episode with the poet Peter Russell, an acolyte of Pound’s who turned up at his door soliciting a passage for his journal NINE from the old man’s translation of Tibullus.[xxii] Russell went on to publish an article about the visit, “An Afternoon with George Santayana”, which Santayana found “a surprising travesty of what I said to him, especially about Mr T. S. Eliot and Mr Ezra Pound.”[xxiii] What in fact had he said about the two poets? In an exchange with Lowell about Racine, Santayana would chide that, whereas Racine’s work had plot, Lowell’s was like Pound’s: in danger of “furnish[ing] landscape splendidly, but leav[ing] us confused about your plot and characters.”[xxiv] Later when Cory reports that Lowell has called Pound “a great man”, Santayana responds crossly.[xxv] Later still, in a letter to an old Oxford acquaintance, he sheds some light on emotions lurking beneath these reactions:
I have recently become deeply interested in the new American poets. I have long known Ezra Pound, and I saw him often here during the war, but was never reconciled to his ways in speech or in writing. But Robert Lowell from the first attracted me for various paradoxes that I found realised in him; and his rugged personality now that I have seen him, has not frightened me away [xxvi]
The response is fundamentally based on aesthetics. Pound was antipathetic to Santayana in a way that Lowell was not. A streak of homoeroticism may lurk in it, also an affinity for the echt-New England patrician Lowell’s reaction against the Puritanism of his background in favour of an older Catholic tradition.[xxvii] Despite the Europhilia of his expatriation, Pound would rarely strain for a quietude or “Ewig weibliche” (4) (Mariolatry) intrinsic to this and congenial to Santayana. That said, it is worth noting that Santayana’s last effort veered like much of errant Ezra’s towards this world and its politics. A year before his death, Santayana wrote to his publisher, then preparing his book Dominations and Powers:
I have received a comparatively clear letter from Ezra Pound in which he writes ‘What about this book of yours? Are your publishers trying to suppress your indecorous opinions? Or is it merely the usual American tempo – molasses flowing uphill below zero?’… To disperse his morbid fears, will you please add his name and send him a copy… with my compliments? [xxviii]
A month later he reports to Lowell:
Pound has written me quite intelligibly and in a placid mood, on receiving my book. I am very glad I sent it to him [xxix]
After Santayana’s death in 1952, it was left to Cory to collate his papers and publish what of them appeared not to deserve oblivion. There was sufficient money and academic interest to provide annotated editions; Cory in 1963 also published a memoir based on the vast bulk of letters the philosopher had written to him since their first meeting in 1927. From these one cannot fail to see that Santayana never stopped struggling to come to terms with the expatriate moderns who dominated poetry in his later years. His friend Logan Pearsall Smith had warned Cory when a young man in London not to “go slumming with such an eccentric fraud [as Eliot]”[xxx]; Santayana would repeat this in various housebroken guises:
Eliot is entangled in his own coils. How can he publish such an indecent article as that of Ezra Pound in this number of The Criterion? [xxxi]
He deprecates Eliot for finding Pound “magnificent” and questions the value of his judgement overall. The Uses of Poetry and the Uses of Criticism he judges damningly “English” –
I don’t think Englishmen are inclined to think, unless there is something wrong with them [xxxii]
After Strange Gods, he would find more impressive, but remarks with faint praise: “Eliot is honest and brave, but limited.”[xxxiii]Murder in the Cathedral elicits the quip,
England is becoming stranger and stranger to me, and less and less appealing. I once loved it so much that this is rather a tragedy [xxxiv]
Eliot, it seems, could feel the vibrations. Cory prodded him into publishing an essay on Santayana’s later philosophy but reported his impression that Eliot was reluctant to revive interest in the Hispano-American for an English audience.[xxxv] No doubt aware of the antipathy of Russell & Co. – “nothing original in Santayana: all Plato and Leibniz” [xxxvi] – the politic Eliot may have felt it rash to sail against a prevailing wind. Reception and response of this kind in England might suggest a growing similarity between Santayana and Pound, but if so, it did not lead to solidarity. Cory, in Santayana’s pocket, refused Eliot’s request to review Pound’s Guide to Kulchur; and Santayana would scold Cory for encouraging Pound to send him the book, saying that he would return it at once as he was only an admirer of “putrid Petrarch” or “miserable Milton” [xxxvii]. Politic himself, Cory did manage to cajole Eliot into letting him review Realms of Truth for The Criterion [xxxviii], so perhaps Eliot’s view of Santayana was in fact more favourable than it appeared, or improved over time: after he closed The Criterion, he would join Pound in inviting the philosopher to help them launch a journal about education; Santayana declined the honour, and the idea was dropped.[xxxix]
Disillusionment with England and its bien-pensant certainly grew in Santayana during the War and after. He would express qualified regard for works by Cyril Connolly, Karl Popper, Arnold Toynbee and others [xl], but Russell would continue to annoy him, prompting the remark, “I feel how inhuman these high-principled self-righteous people are” [xli]. He recalls with contempt a “personal shamming involved” in mixing with such English folk, citing not only Russell but Lady Ottoline Morrell [xlii]. Reading Osbert Sitwell moves him to inveigh, “This aristocracy deserve[s] to disappear more than the French” [xliii]; and C. S. Lewis earns his disdain for a “cheap way of summing things up in two words and announcing that all else is effete”. [xliv] The scars of war, as for Pound, may have added intensity to these reactions; but there is substance in them as well. The “error of British empiricism”, Santayana would muse, “is that it reduces ideas from essences to perceptions” [xlv] – a crucial distinction, leading him to reflect, “That traditional British philosophers dislike me is perfectly natural”.[xlvi] In his view Russell et al had “missed the bus… for all [their] talent and omnipotence.”[xlvii] In the end “science is only a side development” to religion; “the bulk of human experience is incorrigibly poetical”; and “the important thing [is] to retain a sense of piety”.[xlviii]
The extent to which a half-broken and aged Ezra Pound would come to similar attitudes is debatable. As Santayana in later years laboured to understand more of the method of his two “great” American expatriate successors [xlix], so perhaps Pound came to aspire to a touch of a grace he could not have failed to glimpse in their grand predecessor. Perhaps this is part of why, when the foremost disciple of Santayana visited him in Venice in 1966, Pound chose the moment to remark that he had
…botched it… I picked out this and that thing that interested me, and then jumbled them in a bag. But that’s not the way to make… a work of art[l]
This verdict, reported by Cory, has disarmed or qualified formidable criticism for many, as would the equally famous aside reported by Allen Ginsberg not long after about “that stupid suburban prejudice [which] spoiled the whole thing”. But how much an otherwise substantially laconic old man genuinely meant these apparent repentances is anyone’s guess. It is plausible that, as is probable at his first meeting an eminent, well-heeled philosopher three decades before, Pound may in part have been trying simply to charm his interlocutor with a becoming humility and/or imitative courtesy.
In the words of Will Durant[li], whose vastly popular writings on philosophy Pound would have known of more than a decade before that meeting, Santayana had
…the soul of a Spanish grandee grafted upon the stock of the gentle Emerson; a refined mixture of Mediterranean aristocracy with New England individualism… the accent of some pagan scholar come from ancient Alexandria… resolved to subject all ‘the phases of human progress’, all the pageant of man’s interests and history, to the scrutiny of reason
Santayana recognised that “the poetry of [myth] helps men to bear the prose of life”; that “to love one’s country, unless that love is quite blind and lazy, must involve a distinction between the country’s actual condition and its inherent ideal”; and that “the great evil of the state is its tendency to become an engine of war… [for] no people has ever won a war”. He despised the waste of capitalism, which destroys self-realisation, yet abjured collectivist doctrines of innate equality. Ultimately he valued the importance of detached judgement and “wisdom [that] comes by disillusionment”.
All this, Durant sums up, “[wrote] itself down quietly, in statuesque and classic prose [with] an undertone of sweet regret for a vanished world”. It is hard not to see in it a marked resemblance to conditions of being and thought that an often agitated, unruly and tormented Ezra Pound yearned after in his own manner.
Editor’s Notes
Guido Cavalcanti, c. 1255-1300, a major Florentine poet who wrote love lyrics in the dolce stil nuovo (“sweet new style”)
John Scotus Erigena, 810- c. 877, Irish philosopher whose translations helped promote Greek patristic writings
Sextus Propertius, 55-43 BC-after 16 BC, author of four books of poetic elegies, most famously Cynthia
Ewig weibliche – “eternal feminine”, a concept popularised by Goethe in Faust
Author’s Notes
[i] 10 July 1928 to (Unidentified) Rubin. The Works of George Santayana, volume v, book 4 (1928-32), edited by William Holzberger et al (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2003)
[ii] 19 January 1935 to Sylvia Bliss. The Letters of George Santayana, edited and with introduction and commentary by Daniel Cory (London: Constable, 1955), 290
[iii] 22 June and 3 September 1936 to Robert Shaw Barlow. Ibid,312, 314
[v] Ezra Pound: Poet. A Portrait of the Man and his Work, volume III ‘The Tragic Years, 1939-72’, A. David Moody (Oxford University Press, 2015), quoting Pound to Santayana, 8 December 1939, and to Eliot, 18 January 1940, as well as Mary de Rachewiltz in Discretions (1971), 127-8
[vi] See Santayana: the Later Years: a portrait in letters, Daniel Cory (New York: Braziller, 1963), 26-7
[vii] He disliked James and an atmosphere of intense masculinism encountered at Harvard. Ibid., 41
[viii] See Works vol. v, book 7 (1941-47), Preface
[ix] See Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (1900), edited by William Holzberger and Herman J. Saatkamp Jr (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1990), Introduction by Joel Porte, xix-xxi
[xxxix] See ‘“It doesn’t . . . matter where you begin”: Pound and Santayana on Education’, by Martin Coleman, The Journal of Aesthetic Education, volume 44, number 4 (Winter 2010), 1-17. Coleman finds Pound ‘genuinely fond’ of Santayana and that the two had enough in common for such a collaboration to make sense. Among other things, he cites the apprehension both had that pressure of social life, money and the ‘business of the universities’ could prelude proper thought and creativity and encouraged young teachers to write and lecture on subjects which they had not yet properly mastered. He also sees similarity between the two in the foundational principle of what Santayana labelled ‘animal faith’
[xlix] He reports to Cory, for example, that reading Eliot on Pound in Fiera Letteraria ‘really throw[s] some light on the mystery of their kind of poetry.’ Ibid., 266
[l] On these late utterances of Pound’s, see, for example, Moody, 799-802
[li] See The Story of Philosophy: the lives and opinions of the world’s greatest philosophers, Will Durant (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1926; The Pocket Library, 1954), 488-508
STODDARD MARTIN is the American-born owner of the London-based publisher Starhaven, a cultural critic who has taught at Harvard, Oxford, Lodz and Warsaw universities, and the author of books including From Wagner to the Wasteland and Monstrous Century
The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein, Farah Mendlesohn, Unbound, 2019, hardback £20
CHRISTOPHER G. NUTTALL reviews an unusually fair appraisal of a sci-fi pioneer
“Over a period of twenty years, Heinlein’s attitudes had shifted noticeably. Were one to include the twenty years previous to that, the word would be ‘dramatically’. This was not always (from my 1980s feminist point of view) a good shift, but it was there, and I was fascinated. Here was a person sometimes ahead of his time, sometimes crosswise, and, towards the end, in retrenchment. As a historian how could I not be entranced?” (Farah Mendlesohn, introduction)
Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988) is one of the founding fathers of modern science-fiction, responsible for such hugely popular and influential works as Stranger in a Strange Land, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Time Enough for Love, and Starship Troopers. It is therefore curious that his works been so rarely been given substantial analysis. Instead, many modern-day critics have judged Heinlein by 21st century standards and declared him to be sexist, racist and bigoted – while others have been completely uncritical of the man and his works. Indeed, to sci-fi devotees like me, attacking him can feel a little like treason. Farah Mendelsohn seeks to separate the man from monster or myth.
After a brief assessment of Heinlein’s life and career, Mendlesohn starts to assess the themes running through Heinlein’s works. One key theme is family. Although he is often branded an individualist, Heinlein talks often about the need for social support structures – familial, rather than governmental. Heinlein’s heroes are never true loners, but have support from their families and friends. Heinlein was very focused on the family, but the family one chooses rather than the family one has. This spans a range between the happy – and very 50s-typical – Stone Family (The Rolling Stones) to the family Lazarus Long built for himself in Time Enough for Love, which came out towards the end of Heinlein’s career. As Heinlein grew older, he grew more cynical; the Stones are an ideal family, in many ways, but the Farnhams (Farnham’s Freehold) are an utter disgrace.
Mendlesohn is quite adept at recognising the concealed racial markers encoded into Heinlein’s text (for example, an otherwise undescribed naval officer likes watermelons and other black-coded traits). But it should be remembered that Heinlein was often quite limited in what he could come out and say, in the climate of his times. It is possible that Heinlein’s early books would have been rejected, outright, if he’d featured openly black heroes or black men in positions of power. But he gave himself enough room to deny it, if necessary. One may argue that this was contemptible, but it was a fact of life. Later, Heinlein made it clear that he had created a series of multiracial worlds. But most of his coloured heroes were still, culturally speaking, Americans. Heinlein’s heroes might have been multiracial, but not multicultural. One might accuse Heinlein of a lack of cultural diversity, particularly in the juveniles, but it should be noted that different cultures are not always better, and it can be hard to empathise with someone from a culture so different to our own that their actions make no sense to us or even come across as evil. Heinlein’s early heroes are Americans because Heinlein saw the American ethos as being the best.
Mendlesohn also raises interesting points regarding Heinlein’s female characters, both lead characters (Podkayne of Podkayne of Mars, and Maureen Smith of To Sail Beyond The Sunset) and secondary characters (Betsy of The Star Beast, Wyoming of Moon). Some of them – Maureen and Betsy – start their careers as second fiddles, held back directly or indirectly by social conventions – and other women. They grow and develop as their stories develop; for example, Maureen couldn’t go back to motherhood, when her estranged children re-entered her life. She had outgrown the parental urge. Podkayne, by contrast, was the victim of failed parenting. Her parents were unable to give her the tools she needed for adulthood; nor, for that matter, was she surrounded by women who would aid her. (Duke Farnham was a similar victim.)
In some ways, however, Mendlesohn is guilty of “interrogating the text from the wrong perspective” (a term infamously devised by Anne Rice). Heinlein’s juveniles were written, first and foremost, for teenage boys – and teenage boys, by and large, are not interested in ‘feminine’ issues. Heinlein glossed over them because his audience would find it a turn-off. Successful female heroes – women, written by women – who appeal to men, do it, in a sense, by turning away from traditional femininity. They are either surrounded by men (Hermione Granger) or exist in male-shaped universes (like Elizabeth Moon’s heroine, Paksenarrion). They are rarely involved with female social groups; the only real exception, as far as I can tell, is Mildred Hubble (Jill Murphy’s Worst Witch series). But her books are written in a manner that allows boys to pretend that she isn’t classically feminine. Heinlein did not set out to be all things to all readers – a good thing too, as it is impossible.
This explains, I think, some of the weaker moments in his earlier juveniles. The main character of Red Planet (1949)shows signs of sexism, as Mendlesohn points out, but his sentiments would not be out of place for a teenage boy (particularly one of Heinlein’s generation). Heinlein clearly evolved, as similar sentiments expressed within Tunnel in the Sky (1955)lead to an embarrassing case of foot-in-mouth syndrome when the hero badmouths girls, only to discover that his friend ‘Jack’ is in fact ‘Jackie’. Indeed, Heinlein would intentionally start writing his juveniles for girls as well as boys, but he kept boys as the core audience – a wise move, as girls will often read boy-books but not vice versa.
This has other effects on his writing. Mendlesohn points to problematic moments within the text – the failure of a father to admit, for example, that his daughter is more than just his daughter – but this is caused by the male mindset. Maureen argues, at one point, that men assume that a woman is subordinate until she proves otherwise. It would be more accurate to say that people (men as well as women) are pigeonholed very quickly and, once pigeonholed, have the greatest difficulty in climbing out of the pigeonhole. The male mindset leads to the same problems as female intuition; when it’s right, it cannot explain why it is right, when it’s wrong, it finds it hard to truly believe it’s wrong. Heinlein depicted this process quite accurately – and, in other books, argued that the only true way to counter it is to give the wrong person room to retreat. This does, of course, require a sensitivity that few people develop.
Mendelsohn’s comments on racism in Heinlein’s works, notably Sixth Column (in which the United States is invaded by “Pan-Asians”) and Farnham’s Freehold, are interesting. Heinlein did not depict the Pan-Asians of Sixth Column very kindly, it is true, but the atrocities they committed are pitiful shadows of the atrocities committed by real-life Imperial Japan. To challenge Heinlein on this requires a certain willingness to ignore real-life atrocities, and Mendlesohn, to her credit, largely avoids it. She does point out that the ‘killing rays’ of the Sixth Column kill Asian-Americans as well as Pan-Asians, but this is an unfortunate – and logical – effect. The ray could not tell the difference between two different groups of Asians.
Farnham’s Freehold is one of Heinlein’s most controversial works, and perhaps his most sadly topical, in the light of recent bitter politics (see my 2018 Amazing Stories review here). It centres around Hugh Farnham – a very atypical hero for Heinlein, being something of a failure at life – and his family; his drunkard wife, his resentful son, his carefree daughter and her best friend and his African-American houseboy Joe. Following a nuclear war, Hugh and his family are pitched into the far future … a truth they only discover when they come face to face with the black masters of the future world, a world where whites are slaves. The remainder of the story follows their attempts to come to terms with the new situation.
Mendlesohn describes Farnham’s Freehold as an ‘if this goes on …’ book, and concludes that the book is, indeed, racist. To me, it is more of a ‘flipping’ book – an exercise in switching perspectives, and seeing things from another angle. Hugh Farnham and his family are slave-traders, starting in a position of ‘white supremacy’. Following revolutionary upheaval, they then go through a short period of ‘equality,’ followed by ‘black supremacy’ and ending with the ‘aftermath.’ In so doing, they are shown, time and time again, what it is like to be on the opposite end of the scale.
There is room for an entire essay here, but I’ll content myself with a handful of points. Heinlein, throughout his work, identified two different kinds of slaveowner – the thug, who treats his slaves as mere possessions, and the paternalist who tells himself that slavery is for the slave’s own good. When Farnham’s Freehold opens, it becomes clear that Hugh is a paternalist-type, while Duke – his son – is a thug. Their roles are so embedded within their personalities that neither of them really adapts to the period of equality. Worse, when they enter the period of black supremacy, they find themselves at the mercy of another paternalist-thug duo. They are to be denied everything, from freedom itself to the slight comfort of getting away with a little defiance. They may even be eaten alive – the slaveholders of Dixie did not practice cannibalism, as far as I know, but the slaves were certainly metaphorically cannibalised. By the end, Hugh has come to realise – perhaps – just what it is like to have a taste of his own medicine. He had all the answers … he could argue and browbeat his son into submission … but so could his ‘master.’ Farnham’s Freehold raised points that needed (and perhaps still need) to be raised. Mendlesohn judges that it was an overall failure, but it came as close as it could for a book of its time.
Mendlesohn’s assessment of Heinlein’s male and female characters may be pushing things a little too far. She notes that many of Heinlein’s main characters are less interesting than their supporting characters, although – again – this isn’t always a bad thing. Max Jones and John Thomas are bland, compared to Sam and Betsy (Starman Jones, The Star Beast) but that doesn’t mean they’re not heroes. Indeed, their simplicity may be part of the lesson. Max surpasses Sam and comes to safe harbour, at least in part, because he’s honest enough to admit to the deception they’ve pulled; John Thomas defends a friend because it’s the right thing to do, while Betsy, who over-thinks everything, makes things more complicated (and eventually worse). There is little to quibble with here.
Robert Heinlein
Her assessment of the underlying social structures Heinlein depicts is quite accurate – and, unlike some others, she refrains from blaming Heinlein for depicting them. Podkayne’s lack of support from other women has already been noted; Maureen’s financial dependency on her husband, in addition, was quite serious in a world where men controlled money. She also assesses the interaction between the public’ and ‘private’ lives of his characters, noting how they interact (and how things can go wrong.) She does, however, overlook a handful of contextual points. In Time Enough for Love, Lazarus buys and manumits two slaves – a brother-sister pair named Joe and Estrellita. Finding himself responsible for them, he tries to turn them into free people … a difficult task, as they have been raised to be slaves and dependent on their masters to tell them what to do.
Mendlesohn notes that Lazarus treats Estrellita as property, denying her agency, but one can reasonably argue that this was for Estrellita’s (and Joe’s) own good. He regards them both as children in adult bodies – a dangerous combination. Of course, this is also the argument that slaveholders made (as Mendlesohn notes) and, even though it is reasonably justified in this case it does leave a bad taste.
Mendlesohn demonstrates that Heinlein seems to have grown and evolved as he grew more confident, ranging from seemingly-trite adventures to pieces of literary merit. This may have been due to the influence of his second wife, who was a screenwriter and editor. She also makes it clear that Heinlein was very ‘woke’ for his era – he detested slavery, regarded rape as a great evil, created coloured and female characters in an era when no one would have noticed if he hadn’t. And she raises some interesting points about Heinlein’s relationship with guns, although I don’t agree with all of her conclusions. Unlike some modern authors, Heinlein did not fetishise guns, but regarded them as tools, to be used if necessary.
The author’s assessment of how Heinlein was influenced – and later, uninfluenced – by his life is also very good. Mendlesohn draws connections between his naval service and his wartime work and shows how it might have influenced his writing; Heinlein put female characters forward, at least in part, because he worked closely with women during the war. (He wasn’t blind, either, to the issues raised by women entering a formerly masculine sphere.) The influence of both his second and third wives on his career are also discussed, raising the issue of just how many of his issues Heinlein was working out on paper. She also notes that, in his later years, Heinlein lost (at least some) touch with the world around him. It is hard to know how seriously to take this, but it is an interesting point.
The Pleasant Profession is essentially an academic text, but it is well-written, and avoids many of the boredom-inducing pitfalls common to textbooks. But it does have weaknesses. It does not focus on each of the books, separately; it is easy to see how Heinlein evolved, but harder to place his words in context. In this, it is very like Alexei Panshin’s Heinlein in Dimension; it runs the risk of assuming that his characters speak for him, rather than accepting that Heinlein preferred to show us their weaknesses rather than beat us over the head with them. It also notes Heinlein’s weaknesses – the moments we would call ‘problematic’ – without always acknowledging that most of these would not have seemed problematic to Heinlein.
Heinlein was famously not fond of critics, but nevertheless he might have liked this book. Heinlein fans will not agree with everything Mendelsohn says, but in the end she does what few other critics do, and treats the great creator of deeply alien universes as essentially human.
CHRISTOPHER G. NUTTALL is the author of the science-fiction and fantasy novels Ark Royal, The Empire’s Corps, Schooled in Magic and The Zero Equation, and runs The Chrishanger blog
