Books: Neo-Orthodox Gadfly

(2 of 2)

Spilt Religion. Soon tiring of poetry, Hulme launched a Tuesday night salon at the home of his mistress, where he propounded to "journalists, painters, Irish yaps, American bums" the ideas that would later be posthumously published under the apt title, Speculations. Every civilization, Hulme held, was based on certain assumptions about the nature of man. Modern civilization, he argued, was grounded on Renaissance humanism, with its assumption of man's innate perfectibility. This optimistic view had been compounded by the 19th century's evolutionary belief in cultural continuity and the idea of progress. To this, Hulme opposed the doctrine of original sin and the idea that man's nature is fixed, constant and imperfectible.

This attack on 19th century optimism sounds familiar today, but it was still revolutionary in Hulme's time. He enrolled the contending doctrines under the party labels of Romanticism and Classicism and offered definitions of each which rank as classic. The romantic view is "that man is intrinsically good, spoilt by circumstances"; the classical "that he is intrinsically limited, but disciplined by order and tradition to something fairly decent. To one party man's nature is like a well, to the other like a bucket." To Hulme, romanticism was "spilt religion": "You don't believe in God, so you begin to believe that man is a god; you don't believe in Heaven, so you begin to believe in heaven on earth." Hulme insisted that the logical extension of romanticism in politics was the idea of liberal progressive democracy. Politically, classicism called for order, tradition and authority. Hulme agreed with Aristotle that "only a god or a beast could live outside the State."

What he failed to see was that only slaves could live inside the authoritarian superstate. To Hulme, as Biographer Jones rightly notes, must go some of the ideological responsibility for the fact that his friend, the Spanish diplomat Ramiro de Maetzu, died fighting for Franco, that Pound embraced Mussolini, that Wyndham Lewis touted Hitler, and that Eliot's Idea of a Christian Society is a rigidly hierarchical blueprint for what his mentor called "the constant society." On the plus side, Hulme helped make neo-orthodoxy respectable, modern art approachable, and cyclical philosophies of history acceptable.

On the Cuff. For ill or good, Hulme would not have exercised such a magnetic pull over friend and foe if his life had not been as unconventional as his mind. He rarely rose before noon, loved nothing better than to read Kant stretched out in a hot tub, and could not resist marching in Salvation Army parades. He argued that woman's place was in the home, but he was forever picking one up on the streets, and one memorably uncomfortable escapade took place on the steel staircase of the emergency exit at the Picadilly Circus tube station.

When Wyndham Lewis' girl friend left him to become Hulme's fiancée, Lewis tracked his rival down and grabbed Hulme by the throat. Hulme picked Lewis up bodily, marched out to Soho Square and hung Lewis upside down on an iron railing by his trouser cuffs. In a graphic, impromptu way, the episode symbolized what one neo-orthodox nonconformist had done to his generation.