Roaring boy

Patrick McGuinness (ed.),  T.E. Hulme: Selected Writings, Carcanet Press,  222 pages,  £12.95

T.E. Hulme was the roaring boy of pre-1914 literary London:  a tall strapping fellow who once hung Wyndham Lewis up on the railings in Soho Square by his trouser turn-ups.  Twice sent down from Cambridge, he spent time as a labourer in Canada.  He was, perhaps inevitably, very right-wing.

Hulme is often seen as a proto-fascist; the brute with brass knuckledusters: admirer of Action Française, translator of Georges Sorel; friend of Ezra Pound.  Many  –isms attach to Hulme: Cubism, Imagism, Classicism, Modernism.  Considering these (with or without capital letters) is an object lesson in the inconsistencies between the way people see themselves and the way posterity categorises them.

Brutalism, vitalism, primitivism.  To editor Patrick McGuinness, Hulme is a prophet of “Modernism”.  We all know what that is by now – the Machine Age, the weary lecture-hall trudge of Joyce’s Ulysses lost in Eliot’s Waste Land.  Hulme’s article ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ is one of the key texts - academic exhibits – in assessing “Modernism”.

Hulme held the Romantic period began with the Renaissance, its ideology humanism, a belief in Progress and human perfectibility.  This he saw coming to end in the twentieth century, to be succeeded by a new era of Classicism, characterised by hard clear-cut imagery in the arts and a sense of clear limits and distinctions in social life. Hulme admired the abstract qualities of Indian, Byzantine and Egyptian art.  How do you get Modernism out of that?

There are better books about T.E. Hulme than this, though no longer readily available.  McGuinness’s selection reveals Hulme as a journalist with an idée fixe about human perfectibility and “Original Sin”, he regards as particularly clever, which he states and restates, over and over again without ever really explaining or defining.  Much of his thinking, for example his insistence on geometrical qualities in art, reveals his background as a mathematician.

So this collection, published as part of Carcanet’s ‘Lives and Letters’ series, is worthwhile.  Obtuse and repetitive though he is, Hulme’s personality comes bursting out of every page, relevant in digging up underlying assumptions; a more stimulating opponent than William Hague.

‘A Tory Philosophy’, from 1912, sets up order, authority, hierarchy and nationalism as values and finds “this kind of theoretical basis of conviction”  lacking in “the average Conservative leader”, who “talks in many cases exactly as if he were a Socialist”.

Hulme is at his best providing vivid images to illustrate the human struggle to impose conceptual order on the chaos of experience: “images are born in poetry.  They are used in prose, and finally die a long and lingering death in journalists’ English.”  His poetry also surprisingly good: “Old houses were scaffolding once / and workmen whistling”.

But implications are not followed up.  If history is perpetual return, Indian art as good as Renaissance, what  of European supremacy?

His friend Ashley Dukes said Hulme was anti-Semitic.  This is absent from his writings. Two of his heroes were philosopher Henri Bergson and sculptor Jacob Epstein.

Aggressively pro-war in 1914, Hulme nonetheless wrote evocatively of trench-life: “The boredom and discomfort of it, exasperate you to breaking point”.  The trenches were not fit for anyone over four feet in height.

His last deed was to ensure, via Churchill, that Epstein was not called up.  He never knew he had succeeded in this, in September 1917 he was killed in action with the Royal Marine artillery on the Belgian coast.

It is of course true that a blind belief in Progress has been hard to sustain in the twentieth century: in the Middle Ages, Margaret Thatcher would have been burnt as a witch.

23 October 1998