English Modernism, National Identity and the Germans, 1890-1950 (Nineteenth Century Series)

English Modernism, National Identity and the Germans, 1890–1950

Petra Rau

ENGLISH MODERNISM, NATIONAL IDENTITY AND THE GERMANS, 1890–1950

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English Modernism, National Identity and the Germans, 1890–1950

Petra Rau University of Portsmouth, UK

© Petra Rau 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Petra Rau has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Wey Court East Suite 420 Union Road 101 Cherry Street Farnham Burlington Surrey, GU9 7PT VT 05401-4405 England USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Rau, Petra. English Modernism, National Identity and the Germans, 1890–1950. 1. National characteristics, German, in literature. 2. Nationalism – Great Britain – History--19th century. 3. Nationalism – Great Britain – History – 20th century. 4. English literature – 19th century – History and criticism. 5. English literature – 20th century--History and criticism. 6. Literature and society – Great Britain – History – 19th century. 7. Literature and society – Great Britain – History – 20th century. I. Title. 820.9’352931’09034–dc22 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rau, Petra. English Modernism, National Identity and the Germans, 1890–1950 / by Petra Rau. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. English fiction – 20th century – History and criticism. 2. National characteristics, British, in literature. 3. Germany – Foreign public opinion, British. 4. English fiction – German influences. 5. Modernism (Literature) – Great Britain. 6. Germany – In literature. I. Title. PR888.N3557R38 2009 820.9’355–dc22 2009015758 ISBN 9780754656722 (hbk) ISBN 9780754696957 (ebk.V)

Contents List of Figures   Acknowledgements   Introduction  

vii ix 1

1

‘A Sickening Suggestion of Common Guilt’ German Renegades and English Heroes in Conrad’s Fiction  

17

2

Forster’s Accessible Foreignness Prussian Junkers versus ‘German Cosmopolitans’   

41

3

Flirting with the Beastly HunImperial Anxiety and Modern Militarism in the Popular Fiction of Buchan, Le Queux and Saki   65

4

Ford’s ‘Tricky German Fashion’ Medical Modernity and Anglo-Saxon Pathology  

5

‘Monster Men and Women’ Woolf’s Grotesque German Body and Lawrence’s ‘Bad’ Modernity   

119

6

‘The Soldiers of Modernism’ The Lure of Fascist Corporeality in Travel Writing and Fiction  

149

7

‘The Thinning of the Membrane Between the This and the That’: Englishness and Espionage in Blitz Writing  

183

Select Bibliography   Index  

89

213 227

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List of Figures 2.1

Wallis Mills, Hints to foreigners who produce cinema films for the English market. Punch, 09 July 1913, p. 57

3.1 F. Czabran, What Germany intended to do in 1910. Poster Collection (PST13572), Imperial War Museum, London 3.2 Reynolds, Study of a Prussian household having its morning hate. Punch, 24 February 1915, p. 150 3.3 Louis Oppenheim, ‘Wir Barbaren!’. Poster Collection (PST4808) Imperial War Museum, London 4.1 Hans Holbein the Younger, Der Kaufmann Georg Gisze (1532). Bildarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz Berlin; Bildarchiv Nr. 00012218 (Foto Jörg P. Anders) 4.2 Bad Nauheim, Sprudelhof (c. 1912), Hessisches Staatsarchiv Darmstadt (R4/26062) 4.3 Bad Nauheim, Eingang Badehaus 7 (c. 1905), Hessisches Staatsarchiv Darmstadt (R4/26069) 4.4 Bad Nauheim, Badehalle, Badehaus 7 (c. 1906). Hessisches Staatsarchiv Darmstadt (R4/26188) 4.5 Bad Nauheim, Badezelle, Badehaus 7 (c. 1906). Hessisches Staatsarchiv Darmstadt (R4/13143) 5.1

Fritz Kahn, Der Mensch als Industriepalast (c. 1930). Westfälisches Schulmuseum Dortmund

Thomas Cook’s, ‘Germany is News’. The Times, 1 August 1934, p. 17. News International, London.  6.2 German Railways Bureau, London, Germany Welcomes You, The Times, 6 July 1938, p. 9. News International, London 6.3 Reichsarbeitsdienst. Nuremberg Party Rally (1937) Bundesarchiv Koblenz, Bild 146-1975-050-24A 6.4 Ferry Ahrlé, Arbeitsmänner als Helfer der Wehrmacht (1943) Bundesarchiv, Koblenz, Bild 003-013-006 6.5 René Ahrlé, Reichsarbeitsdienst: Wir rüsten Leib und Seele (1944) Bundesarchiv Koblenz, Bild 003-013-009 6.6 ‘Heil! Summer!’ Thomas Cook brochure 1937, Thomas Cook company archive, Peterborough 6.1

42 67 73 78

90 104 114 115 115 144 155 156 159 162 163 167

viii

7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4

English Modernism, National Identity and the Germans, 1890–1950

Telling a friend may mean telling the enemy. Poster Collection (LP149), Imperial War Museum, London Fougasse, Careless talk costs lives: Don’t forget that walls have ears. Poster Collection (MH7356), Imperial War Museum, London Keep mum, she’s not so dumb. Poster Collection (LDP586), Imperial War Museum, London Fougasse, Careless talk costs lives: Of course there’s no harm in your knowing. Poster Collection (MH7369), Imperial War Museum, London

191 192 193 194

Acknowledgements It took me a long time to realize why I was writing this book, and that it has to do with an entirely unacknowledged family tradition of uprooting oneself and settling elsewhere. While my grandparents and parents had left their countries due to historic circumstances beyond their control (and subsequently never budged an inch), I made a conscious choice to emigrate to Britain and accommodate myself in a hybrid, Anglo-German existence. Like most immigrants I had to come to grips with another culture, understand how that culture made sense of me and how the historical conditions of our transnational negotiations had developed. Among other things, this book is a critical review of the literary responses to those conditions in the early twentieth century. My colleagues in the English department at the University of Portsmouth have put up with their Beastly Hun with great good humour and leniency for some time now; it has been a privilege to work with such a wonderfully inspiring group of people. For their various forms of support for this project I would also like to thank Christine Berberich, Sue Harper, Uschi Hempfling, Marina MacKay, Susanne Marten-Finnis, Jodie Medd, Maria Petalidou, Patricia Pulham, Max Saunders, Deborah Shaw, Trudi Tate, Mike and Marion Thorpe, and Alex Tickell. I have received financial support through a small research grant from the British Academy to cover the cost of illustrations. The completion of this monograph would have been immeasurably more difficult without research leave in 2007–8 funded by the AHRC. On many occasions the Centre of European and International Social Research at the University of Portsmouth opened its coffers to assist my research. I would like to thank Brigitte Faatz (Stadtarchiv Bad Nauheim); Eva Haberkorn (Hessisches Staatsarchiv Darmstadt); Jochen Löher (Westfälisches Schulmuseum Dortmund); Paul Smith (company archive, Thomas Cook’s, Peterborough); Sinead Porter (News International Ltd, London). Early versions of chapters were published previously: parts of Chapter 2 as ‘The Trouble with Cosmopolitans: Ford and Forster between Nation and Internationalism’, in Grace Brockington (ed.), Internationalism and the Arts at the Fin de Siècle, New York: Peter Lang, 2009; parts of Chapter 3 as ‘Splendid Little Soldiers: Invasion, Empire and the Fantasy of Dominance in Saki’s When William Came. Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens, 65/1 (2007): 185–207; a version of chapter 6 as ‘The fascist body beautiful and the imperial crisis in 1930s British writing’, Journal of European Studies 38/1 (2009): 5–35; a version of Chapter 7 as ‘The Common Frontier: Fictions of Alterity in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day and Graham Greene’s The Ministry of Fear. Literature and History,



English Modernism, National Identity and the Germans, 1890–1950

14/1 (2005): 31–46. I am very grateful to the editors for permission to reprint this material here in revised form. My editors at Ashgate, Ann Donahue and Kirsten Weissenberg, have shown angelic patience. Rachel Goodyear made heroic efforts to improve my Teutonic syntax and turn it into readable Anglo-Saxon prose; for all remaining grammatical infelicities and intellectual contortions I must accept the blame. Without Cath, Pip and Otto this project wouldn’t have been any fun; I cannot hope to repay their patience and love. I dedicate this book to the memory of my grandparents, Martha Michalsky and Otto Max Rau. Petra Rau Gloucestershire, 2009

Introduction

Englishmen must be more progressive. E.E. Williams, ‘Made in Germany’ (1896)

The existing educational system of this country is chaotic, is ineffectual, is utterly behind the age, makes us the laughingstock of every advanced nation in Europe and America, puts us not only behind our American cousins but the German and the Frenchman and the Italian. Arthur Balfour in Manchester (1902)

We are getting Germanised or Americanised or automobilised or electrified. Ford Madox Ford, The Spirit of the People (1907)

At the turn of the century there seemed to exist a remarkable consensus amongst economists, politicians and writers that England was no longer ‘modern’ enough and was ‘utterly behind the age’. It was not progressive but tradition-bound; its citizens were not suitably educated for the demands of the era, and they no longer invented the technologies that revolutionized the world. Even contemporary historians of the First World War have interpreted this conflict as symptomatic of the clash between English tradition and German modernity. Indeed, there is nothing English modernism is more anxious about than modernity and modernization, which is perhaps what makes the term ‘English modernism’ almost contradictory and forces it into inverted commas. Englishlanguage modernism, when it engages with modernity, often seems to question ‘Englishness’, and vice versa. Yet this tension between modernity and national identity is rarely tackled without a third term, a conduit that serves to channel much of the anxiety onto an ‘other’ through which imponderables can be more easily articulated. That third term, I would argue, is the Germans. In this sense this book is not (merely) concerned with Germans as a literary trope or as a   E.E. Williams, ‘Made in Germany’, 2nd edn, London, 1896, p. 174.   Balfour speech at Manchester in October 1902, cited in Donald Read (ed.), Documents from Edwardian England, 1901–15, London, 1973, p. 227.    Ford Madox Ford, England and the English, ed. Sara Haslam, Manchester, 2003, p. 326.    See Modris Eksteins, The Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, London, 1990.  



English Modernism, National Identity and the Germans, 1890–1950

more or less accurate cultural phenomenology. Rather, I am interested in what this protracted German discourse tells us about Englishness and English cultural anxieties in the early twentieth century. Ultimately, I am perhaps most preoccupied by the often oxymoronic nature of English modernism which no publisher, librarian or bookseller would like to see complicated by inverted commas. Even if modernism now often comes without national or linguistic communities attached to it in order to designate it more easily as an international movement with shared aesthetic agendas, resorting to political, historical or poetological subcategories is still a common strategy in classifying writing that does not really lend itself to periodization: British modernism; Edwardian writing; interwar fiction; early modernism; High Modernism; war writing; etc. ‘Englishness’ at the time denoted a set of cultural values firmly attached to contemporaneous notions of ‘race’ and ‘national character’ that had become legitimizing fictions for expansion. ‘Britishness’ therefore really meant ‘Englishness in the Empire’ and should not be confused with its contemporary, inclusive usage. Similarly, the term British modernism is often convenient because it includes Irish writers such as Yeats and Joyce, particularly in studies of Modernism that have focal points other than national identity. My approach to modernism is therefore both thematic and fundamental: why is the English encounter with modernity and modernization so traumatic, and why does it almost always involve a problematization of national identity? The most straightforward answer to this question is of course that modernity, particularly in the early twentieth century, is not a national phenomenon but an increasingly global development and therefore contributes to the symptomatically anxious formation of political nationalisms as a counter-response. E.E. Williams’s ‘Made in Germany’ (1896) was indicative of the kind of alarmist polemic that meant to shake up complacent attitudes about British superiority by pointing to the shifting economic conditions in a world market. In one of the most effective passages in his book, Williams simply encouraged his readers to examine closely their domestic environment and its economic origins: You will find that the material of some of your own clothes was probably woven in Germany. Still more probable is it that some of your wife’s garments are German importations; while it is practically beyond a doubt that the magnificent mantles and jackets wherein her maids array themselves on their Sundays out are German-made and German-sold, for only so could they be done at the figure. Your governess’s fiancé is a clerk in the city; but he also was made in Germany. The toys, and the dolls, and the fairy books which your children maltreat in the nursery are made in Germany: nay, the material of your favourite (patriotic) newspaper had the same birthplace as like as not. Roam the house over, and the   German literary history, by comparison, resorts to the vaguer term ‘modernity’ (‘Literatur der Moderne’) and aesthetic subcategories such as Symbolism, Jugendstil, Expressionism, Surrealism, Neo-Romanticism, Neue Sachlichkeit, ‘Heimatkunst’, etc.

Introduction



fateful mark will greet you at every turn, from the piano in your drawing-room to the mug on your kitchen dresser, blazoned though it be with the legend, A Present from Margate. Descend to your domestic depths, and you shall find your very drain-pipes German made. You pick out of the grate the paper wrappings from a book consignment, and they also are ‘Made in Germany’. You stuff them into the fire, and reflect that the poker in your hand was forged in Germany. As you rise from your hearthrug you knock over an ornament on your mantelpiece; picking up the pieces you read, in the bit that formed the base, ‘Manufactured in Germany’. And you jot your dismal reflections down with a pencil that was made in Germany. At midnight your wife comes home from an opera which was made in Germany, has been here enacted by singers and conductor and players made in Germany, with the aid of instruments and sheets of music made in Germany. You go to bed, and glare wrathfully at the text on the wall; it is illuminated with an English village church, and it was ‘Printed in Germany’. If you are imaginative and dyspeptic, you drop off to sleep only to dream that St. Peter (with a duly stamped halo round his head and a bunch of keys from the Rhineland) has refused your admission into Paradise, because you bear not the Mark of the Beast on your forehead, and are not of German make. But you console yourself with the thought that it was only a Bierhaus Paradise anyway; and you are awakened in the morning by the sonorous brass of a German band.

In this imaginative and dyspeptic passage Williams makes any conventional invasion of England – a constant fear in the Edwardian era – completely superfluous because German manufacturing and export trade have already burrowed into quotidian and cultural life. In a global export market, even traditional national signifiers are manufactured abroad; in this vision ‘Englishness’ seems like a naive illusion of a colonized people about its cultural independence. What we find in many of the literary texts I analyse here is a very similar argument: modernity is identified as a foreign agent that influences, challenges and even undermines Englishness. This might very well be a reaction to the geopolitical transition of accelerated industrial progress from Britain to countries like Germany and the USA. For historians and economists, industrial and imperial rivalry may answer satisfactorily to the modernist crisis about modernization but this seems a rather reductive explicatory paradigm for a cultural aesthetic whose avant-garde often eschews political engagement or realism and proclaims a refined horror of the masses. Anxieties about (international and transnational) modernity were of course not confined to England. In Germany, for instance, modernity was an American   Williams, ‘Made in Germany’, pp. 10ff.   Williams’s book triggered a vigorous debate about the prospects of the nation’s economic future in the light of increasing international competition. See in response Harold Cox, Are We Ruined By the Germans?, London, 1896.  



English Modernism, National Identity and the Germans, 1890–1950

invention, epitomized by the automobile and the velodrome, made commercially successful by Taylorism and Fordism and translatable into its German version, ‘rationalization’. Cultural and economic concepts of modernity did travel, but they did not necessarily retain their meanings. In Britain, efficiency was associated with Germany; in Germany it alluded to American modes of production. The Germans, like the English, responded to this foreign modernity with considerable ambivalence. Notwithstanding the aesthetic modernity of Alfred Döblin, Gottfried Benn, Bertolt Brecht and Else Lasker-Schüler, Germans often tended to engage with particular processes of modernization alongside a philosophical (rather than a purely literary) enquiry into modernity: Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Weber, Georg Simmel, and later Heidegger, Horkheimer and Adorno, and Habermas tried to tackle the concept of modernity from a range of angles that continue to inform the debate about postmodernity. A more differentiated approach to the nexus of anxious modernity and the Germans in English culture is to see it within a context of recent revaluations of modernist aesthetics as the product of complex, mutually contradictory and often anti-modernist socio-political impulses. Across a spectrum of early twentiethcentury writing, then, modernity is not just represented in a rebellious, radical and provocative avant-garde response but includes more careful, even conciliatory negotiations of cultural anxieties and public attitudes that also conditioned publication; even the narrow group of High modernists demonstrated an awareness of, even a compliance with, the sociocultural climate of literary production that imprints itself in their work. In this sense, Virginia Woolf’s challenge to the social realism of Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy and H.G. Wells in ‘Modern Fiction’ tells only half the story of modernism; it may conveniently posit an innovative aesthetic agenda, but it does not adequately summarize its complex, even contradictory phenomenology. Woolf’s own work is intensely engaged with the social realities of the time: eugenics and degeneration, empire and its decline, class conflict and war, sexual identity and shifting gender roles, mass culture and the consumer society, motorization, the cinema, the radio, the aeroplane – they are all part of what percolates into and is refracted by modernist consciousness producing the epistemological uncertainty that has often been seen at the heart of modernist poetics, even if her attitudes are by no means always ‘progressive’ and her style not always High modernist. Modernity, of course, is not always synonymous with progress, nor does early twentieth-century writing always unequivocally embrace modernity. (The term ‘modernist’ is still reserved for affirmative articulations of modernity in style and theme in a selective way that does not apply to other period-specific writing, such as Victorian literature.) Indeed, ‘modern’ is often a troubling, pejorative   See Mary Nolan, Visions of Modernity: American Business and the Modernization of Germany, New York, 1994, pp. 73ff.   See for instance David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, Oxford, 1990, pp. 10–39.

Introduction



adjective in the works of Conrad, Forster or Lawrence. Celia Marshik has found convincing evidence of a censorship dialectic that has shaped modernist literature: pre-emptive self-censorship on the one hand, and ironized engagement with social purity movements and official repression on the other.10 Jeffrey Weeks has argued that English progressives such as Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis – often cited as indicative of shifting social and sexual mores and roles – had little influence on the British medical establishment or indeed the British public. The British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology may have had prominent members amongst the British intelligentsia, but the overall membership seems to have been around a mere 250. At its world congress in London in 1929, the World League for Sexual Reform still mainly worked towards shifting public opinion rather than organizing political action.11 Freud may have been a household name in the 1920s yet he certainly did not enjoy a wide readership in England, even after he was translated into English. It was the Social Purity movement and organizations such as the Society for the Suppression of Blasphemous Literature, the Society for the Suppression of Vice, the London Public Morality Council and the National Vigilance Association that were perhaps more representative of the social climate of the time and exerted considerable political influence. These reactionary organizations certainly saw cultural modernity as a danger to public morality and physical well-being, whether it manifested itself in cinema-goers’ habits or the motor car; in post-Impressionist art or Futurism; in birth control clinics or ‘obscene’ publications; in the lack of foundation garments or in new haircuts. Yet their anxiety about and rejection of modernity (or at least certain types of modernity) are also part of the literary manifestations of modernism that these conservative movements identify as dangerous: D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, for instance, begins with a rejection of ‘modern’ sexuality as mere orgasmic technique. Both William Greenslade and Donald Childs have argued that eugenic agendas imprinted themselves on literary representations and shaped writers’ ideologies regarding nation, race, class and corporeality in ways that overtly rejected certain visions of modernity.12 Just as modernism was capable of responding to modernity in reactionary ways,13 so modernist aesthetics could be used to create a ‘modern’ political reality. Indeed Mark Wollaeger argues that some   Celia Marshik, British Modernism and Censorship, Cambridge, 2006.   Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800, London, 1981, pp. 184–6. 12   William Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture and the Novel, 1880–1940, Cambridge, 1994. Donald J. Childs, Modernism and Eugenics: Woolf, Eliot, Yeats and the Culture of Degeneration, Cambridge, 2001. 13  See for instance Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich, Cambridge, 1984. Andrew Hewitt, Fascist Modernism, Stanford, 1993. David Mattless, Landscape and Englishness, London, 1998. Charles Ferrall, Modernist Writing and Reactionary Politics, Cambridge, 2001. Laura Frost, Sex Drives: Fantasies of Fascism in Literary Modernism, Ithaca, 2002. 10

11

English Modernism, National Identity and the Germans, 1890–1950



proto-modernist techniques like ‘literary impressionism’ with its epistemological uncertainty significantly contributed to the erosion of ‘facts’ upon which the effectiveness of political strategies such as propaganda depended.14 Vincent Sherry’s The Great War and the Language of Modernism sees reflected in the syntactical structures of London modernists such as Woolf, Eliot and Pound the impact of the kind of rhetoric that political liberalism deployed to legitimize the war. At the basis of their experimental post-war art is an awareness of a change in – largely an erosion of – ‘the language of established value’ that reaches from the strained, baffled rationalizations of Ford’s narrator Dowell in The Good Soldier to the ‘verbal indirections’ that represent ‘the failing grasp of an older, rational language’ and historical reality in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.15 In Sherry’s version, modernism is an aesthetic reaction that takes its cue from the liberal betrayal of the war. Modernism in fact often struggled with the demands and corollaries of modernity without this necessarily resulting in anti-modernist stances. Its proponents had difficulties with contemporary (and ‘modern’) attitudes towards sex and the body (Woolf, Mansfield, Isherwood), with machines in general (Lawrence, Wells) and the automobile in particular (Forster). They fretted about degeneration (Conrad, Woolf, Buchan) and about the kinds of policies and treatments that might result from eugenic policies (Woolf, Lawrence). Empire, its demands, its defence and its demise seemed a ubiquitous concern. Political loyalties in the form of patriotism seemed suspect to most of them, particularly when patriotism was sold as ‘modern’ civic duty (Bowen, Greene, Woolf, Forster, Orwell). If England seemed too small and narrow a country, it also had its pastoral comforts; ever-greater mobility made travel more affordable and less arduous (compared with the late Victorian age) but it also exposed one to foreign perils. Immigration was as much a spectre as degeneration (plus ça change). Then as now, England saw itself almost permanently on the threshold of invasions by beastly foreigners: Russian and German Jews, German waiters, French degenerates, Indian doctors, Irish merchants and soldiers, American magnates hunting for pedigrees among the English aristocracy.16 The Aliens Act of 1905 is as much a testament to transnational migration as to a turnof-the-century siege mentality that could manifest itself in xenophobia, racism and willed insularity. If the modernity of modernism has recently been increasingly qualified, its Englishness has never had a lot of critical support. The Modernism exhibition at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum in 2006 was ample demonstration of

  Mark Wollaeger, Modernism, Media and Propaganda: British Narrative Form, 1900–1945, Princeton, 2006. 15   Vincent Sherry, The Great War and the Language of Modernism, Oxford, 2003, pp. 19, 227, 296. 16  See Robert Winder, Bloody Foreigners: The Story of Immigration to Britain, London, 2004. 14

Introduction



the absence of significant English (or even British) impulses outside literature.17 Similarly, an international conference at Clare College in Cambridge in 2007 on Internationalism and the Arts in the Fin de Siècle highlighted a rather limited involvement of English culture.18 For Terry Eagleton, England merely temporarily housed international modernism rather than offered it a fertile soil in which to grow roots.19 More recently, however, Jed Esty has argued that English modernism’s reluctance towards intercultural exchange did not have its roots in a kind of national, cultural impermeability, but in its very opposite. Particularly as a global imperial power, its culture had already begun to ‘hollow out’ national culture. In its universalist and metacultural nature – an ineluctable product of colonialism – ‘England stands as a paradigm for modernization, but not of modernism’.20 Some of the cultural nostalgia for a traditional, essential Englishness that we find in modernist writing is ostensibly the corollary of modern imperialism. This sounds tempting, particularly in the light of Ian Baucom’s argument, in Out of Place, that the Empire becomes the occasion for the loss of Englishness. Many of the material signifiers of Englishness in the colonies (cricket fields, colonial architecture, school curricula) are attempts to reconstruct an absent culture that depends at home and abroad on the invocation of locale, but that locale itself remains either indefinable or only exists through continually reiterated literary and cultural tropes: ‘the sceptred isle’, ‘Deep England’, ‘the green and pleasant land’.21 Yet modernism does not just return to an increasingly chimerical ‘England’, it also has to come to terms with an empire that can no longer be ruled as confidently and complacently as of old. The crisis of Englishness is compounded by an ongoing imperial crisis that no amount of Kiplingesque rhetoric can gloss over. While the colonial administration abroad upholds past traditions of Englishness and clings to cultural practices that overcompensate for a loss of national identity (as we see so ironically demonstrated in Forster’s A Passage to India), England itself experiences an inward reorientation in the 1930s and 40s. Hence Woolfean pageants, Forsterian native traditions and mass observation’s domestic anthropology. Cultural navelgazing, however, does not necessarily resolve the question of precisely what it means to be English; it often merely rehearses old tropes: it revives the pastoral, the pageant, the ode. And a great deal of irony is reserved for these rehearsals, in the literal sense: remember the whiff of ordure at the beginning of Woolf’s Between the Acts.   See Christopher Wilks (ed.), Modernism 1914–1939: Designing a New World, V&A Exhibition Catalogue, London, 2006, pp.249–97. 18   See Grace Brockington, Internationalism and the Arts in the Fin de Siècle, Oxford, 2009. 19  See Terry Eagleton, Exiles and Emigrés, New York, 1970. 20   Jed Esty, A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England, Princeton, 2004, p. 35. 21  Ian Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire and the Locations of Identity, Princeton, 1999, pp. 3–40. 17



English Modernism, National Identity and the Germans, 1890–1950

The cogency of Baucom’s and Esty’s arguments notwithstanding, the early twentieth-century negotiation of Englishness often required a third element alongside the relation to empire: ‘the Germans’. However appropriate Frederic Jameson’s critique of a historically and critically narrow focus on European others within modernism once was, it is now perhaps worth revisiting that European focus, in the light of such astute postcolonial arguments as Baucom’s and Esty’s.22 I have placed another set of tiresome inverted commas around ‘the Germans’ as a distinct cultural or national entity, a linguistic group or indeed as a literary trope. When I speak of the Germans I speak of a cultural phenomenology: of the way in which Germans, Germany, or German ‘national character’ were perceived by British culture. This perception does not necessarily tally with the image the Germans had of themselves, nor with contemporary historians’ assessment of German modernities, which wavers between regarding them as dynamic (Blackbourn) or rooted in staid bourgeois provincialism epitomized in the bêtises of the Kaiser (Mommsen) or constantly in the process of reclaiming a traumatic loss (Schivelbusch).23 Distinguished scholars have grappled with ‘the Germans’ and the Germans before me and my contribution owe a great deal to their efforts. Much research has been done on German influences on nineteenth-century British culture, from Rosemary Ashton’s seminal The German Idea and Little Germany to Stanley Weintraub’s biography of Prince Albert von Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Individual writers’ German connections and ‘German ideas’ have also received detailed analysis that has enriched the burgeoning field of Anglo-German cultural relations: Gerlinde Roder Bolton’s work on George Eliot and Goethe; S.S. Prawer’s monograph on Thackeray’s German discourse; Karl Krockel’s D.H. Lawrence and Germany (2007). Gisela Argyle’s Germany as Model and Monster: Allusions in English Fiction, 1830–1930 (2002) covers an impressive range indeed but its focus on intertextuality and reception theory understandably limits its ability to analyse the ambivalences towards Germany in English culture as symptoms of specific sociohistorical discourses about national identity. Peter Edgerly Firchow’s The Death of the German Cousin: Variations on a Literary Stereotype, 1890–1920 (1986) has a clear imagological agenda and traces the deterioration of Anglo-German relations up to and beyond the First World War. His reading of cultural and literary representations as fairly accurate responses to political developments and historical circumstances 22   Frederic Jameson, ‘Modernism and Imperialism’, in Terry Eagleton et al., Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature, Minneapolis, 1990, pp. 43–66. 23   See David Blackbourn, The Fontana History of Germany, 1780–1918, London, 1997. David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape and the Making of Modern Germany, London, 2007. Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Imperial Germany, 1867–1918: Politics, Culture, and Society in an Authoritarian State, trans. Richard Deveson, London, 1995. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning and Recovery, trans. Jefferson Chase, London, 2004.

Introduction



is a thesis I wish to be as careful with as with the long held reductive truism that modernism could be defined as a radical break with earlier traditions and an unequivocal advocacy of the ‘modern’. Both John Ramsden’s Don’t Mention the War: The British and the Germans since 1890 (2006) and Richard Milton’s more polemical Best of Enemies: Britain and Germany: 100 Years of Truth and Lies (2007) express their tiredness with the stereotypes that still govern the British relationship with Germany and see the world wars as constant reference points. Yet both acknowledge that the myths constructed through these stereotypes are hard to dislodge because they have become integral to English identity; ‘the Germans’, i.e. the cultural phenomenology to which they are harnessed, are a necessary other for a nostalgic post-war construction of Englishness, even for generations that have no experience of that war or no interest in it. A recent example may illustrate this: it is perhaps no coincidence that historians, writers and philosophers have returned to the issue of the controversial carpet bombing of Germany in the Second World War during an equally controversial war in Iraq. Were the terrifying raids that laid waste to Hamburg and Dresden part of an effective, proportionate and justifiable measure (Frederick Taylor) or an ineffectual, punitive act of retribution and possibly a war crime (A.C. Grayling)?24 Whichever side one takes, there is little doubt that what is at stake here is the mythical notion of the unblemished English character as representative of morally unassailable ‘civilization’ (that well-worn imperial and Churchillian staple of political rhetoric). A.L. Kennedy’s novel Day (2007) demonstrates how literature can assume elegant positions of ambivalence in such debates that are perhaps harder for historians to inhabit, and hers is just one voice in an increasingly critical literary discourse about the last world war that begins to point to the ways in which myths have come to shape not just the future, but the past. It is in the nature of myth that it offers a simpler truth and therefore proves largely impervious to revision. In this book I do not attempt to revise the truism that early-twentieth-century relations between Britain and Germany were determined by imperial and economic rivalry and by fascist aggression. I do wish to show, however, that the cultural response to Germany was not uniformly characterized by hostility, and that it was crucially connected to a larger discourse about modernity that was highly ambivalent about its uses and its meanings, and about the consequences on England and Englishness of an international, even foreign modernity. In this sense, my work is also indebted to the methodologies of cultural and literary analyses that focus on colonial, sexual or ethnic others such as Bryan Cheyette’s Modernity, Culture and ‘the Jew’ (1998), Laura Doan and Jane Garrity’s Sapphic Modernities: Sexuality, Women and National Culture (2006) and Ian Baucom’s Out of Place: Englishness, Empire and the Locations of Identity (1999).

24   Frederick Taylor, Dresden: Tuesday 13 February 1945, London, 2004. A.C. Grayling, Among the Dead Cities: Was the Allied Bombing of Civilians in WWII a Crime or a Necessity?, London, 2006.

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It may come as a surprise that not all Germans in modernist British writing are Beastly Huns or portly Valkyries plotting evil against the British Empire. Literary responses to ‘the burning question of Germany’ were not exclusively thinlyclad xenophobia.25 Even for some of the most commercial hacks, writing about Germany was often a way of thinking about the condition of England. Modernism does witness a transition in the view of Germans from the learned and cultured cousin of Victorian times to the belligerent Teuton of the early twentieth century, but this shift cannot simply be reduced to the effects of war. Indeed, just when the nations are at their most belligerent, cultural and political similarities resurface with uncanny persistence. And the image of the German changes, often not in response to actual historical or political events such as war, but in anticipation of what these events might mean for the nature of Englishness. Therefore the shifting construction of ‘Germanness’ is necessarily a reflection of specifically English anxieties about an uncertain future, discontents with an unreliable present and moments of cultural unease about the past. Images of German national identity are often uncertain projections of desired otherness to Englishness, projections that insist on alterity and myth in order to confirm a distinct difference between two nations strangely familiar with each other. If the modernist German discourse revises more sympathetic nineteenth-century attitudes, it does so in response to a historically specific crisis of Englishness (as demonstrated in the writings on Englishness by Masterman, Ford, Forster and Orwell); in other words, English modernism often articulates the problematics of national identity through representations of Germans. Any examination of representations of ‘Germanness’ is not merely an imagological analysis of national stereotypes and cultural prejudice reflected in or shaped by the literature of the time, but, more importantly, a critical reflection on the necessity of the German other for the construction of Englishness for the period in question. This dependence is by no means always subject to agency but may be part of a more unconscious, even uncanny, process. Indeed, much of the underlying rhetoric in representations of Germanness in the period in question is based on a denial of familiarity, a literal ‘making strange’ of potentially too intimate cultural affinities. However, the dynamics of projection and identification that underlie identity formation do not happen in a vacuum: they are in turn conditioned by cultural practices and historical developments, utilized by ideologies or social institutions, and obfuscated by subsequent modes of remembering and forgetting. This project, then, also examines the psychology of identity formation as reflected in and steered by (mostly) literary aesthetics. In The English Novel (2004) Terry Eagleton did not bother to justify the inclusion of Henry James, James Joyce and Joseph Conrad in his survey. But what makes their work ‘English’ other than the language in which it is published would really merit some thought. For Eagleton, their canonical status as reflected on undergraduate curricula seems to make the question of national literature   Erskine Childers, The Riddle of the Sands, ed. David Trotter, Oxford, 1998, p. 90.

25

Introduction

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irrelevant. These writers’ contributions to the genre and to the English language earn them a place in the pantheon irrespective of their national origins. I am similarly magnanimous in the selection of my textual corpus. Not all of the writers discussed are ‘English’; indeed the more complicated their personal loyalties and political affiliations, the more interesting things they appear to have to say about Englishness, or English negotiations of modernity. The more hyphenated their identities, the keener their observations. Hence I would not do without the Anglo-Polish Joseph Conrad, Elizabeth von Arnim (who married a Prussian Junker), the Anglo-German Ford Hermann Hueffer who metamorphosed into Ford Madox Ford and the Anglo-Irish Elizabeth Bowen. Emigrants and expatriates like D.H. Lawrence and Christopher Isherwood deliver invaluable insights. I have also generously included hybrid genres like travel writing alongside letters and diaries whenever they yielded interesting nuggets. Popular literature also receives some attention, not only because my working concept of modernism reaches beyond stylistic innovation, but because it often proves a valuable barometer for contemporary anxieties that High modernism doesn’t tackle in the same way. The plots of Erskine Childers, John Buchan and Graham Greene – all of them still in print – deploy genre fiction as if cultural and political ambivalences could be subjected to and resolved by the demands of form. The resulting tensions and inconsistencies under which their narratives strain tell us a great deal about the ways in which cultural anxieties are addressed rather than ‘worked through’. The involvement of British writers in propaganda during the First World War is well known and well researched.26 I have, on the whole, steered clear of overt propaganda efforts such as Ford’s When Blood is Their Argument (1915) and Arnold Bennett’s Mr Brittling Sees it Through (1916), or traumatized responses to war such as Kipling’s ‘Mary Postgate’. There is a good reason why many of the outpourings of Wellington House are now out of print, unread and embarrassing footnotes to literary history. While these government-sponsored works are not in themselves uninteresting, they are perhaps more relevant in terms of cultural history rather than for literary merit. Vincent Sherry’s The Great War and the Language of Modernism makes a convincing case for the way in which liberal rhetoric and propaganda shaped the way in which modernists used language with a much greater sense of the cleft between historical reality and traditional ways of expression. Nor would I want to claim comprehensiveness for this study, even within the limited literary agenda that concerns me most. Oscar Wilde’s love of Wagner and Dorothy Richardson’s many references to German musicality in the first volume of Pilgrimage, Pointed Roofs (1915) remain as neglected as Forster’s Beethoven   For the most extensive analysis see Peter Buitenhuis, The Great War of Words: British, American, and Canadian Propaganda and Fiction, 1914–1933, Vancouver, 1987. Wollaeger, Modernism, Media and Propaganda. For a comparison with WW2 strategies see Michael Balfour, Propaganda in War, 1939–45: Organisation, Policies and Publics in Britain and Germany, London, 1979. 26

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concert in chapter five of Howards End. More musically perceptive researchers than myself have already attended to them.27 Brave as Richardson’s gesture towards German Kultur was in a period of unprecedented xenophobic hysteria, its initial foreign backdrop seemed to have a fairly traditional function in a modernist female Bildungsroman, similar to Villette in Charlotte Brontë’s eponymous novel. Occasional references to German culture in other modernist texts (for instance, Rupert Brooke’s writings or T.S. Eliot’s poetry) sadly had to be omitted for reasons of space and stringency of argument. Ultimately not every mention of Germany developed into a substantial argument about modernity, but when it does I have often seen reasons to include the text. The temporal frame for my textual corpus is also wider than conventional definitions of modernism would permit, including the fin de siècle and the immediate post-war period. In so far as the formal boundaries of modernism tend to shift according to analytical and thematic agendas this is perhaps not so unusual. The 60 years covered by this study indicate a consistency of engagement that manifests itself across historical circumstances (war and peace), across a wide stylistic spectrum (early, High, late modernism) and a range of genres (spy thrillers, adventure fiction, travel writing, condition-of-England novel, pastoral) and hybrid variations. While one might argue that political developments in Germany forced ‘the Germans’ into view during the period in question, the same could be said of ‘modernity’ and ‘Englishness’. That they often come as a complex nexus is the central tenet of this book. Chapter 1 deals with the work of Joseph Conrad, ‘a modernist at war with modernity’.28 His Polish heritage certainly informed his attitudes to Russia and Prussia, and those sentiments erupt rather crudely during the First World War. His naturalization as a British citizen places him in the curious position of having to negotiate types of imperialism against one another. As we shall see, Conrad constructs a hierarchy of imperialism on the basis of ‘national character’, homosocial communities and imperial ‘ideals’, and this would suggest a clear ranking with the British at the top. Yet all of these three categories, which are meant to ensure the moral justification for British imperialism, prove to be singularly unreliable so that the narrative slips, qua Marlow’s equivocations, from under Conrad’s loyalist convictions. What, if anything, usefully distinguished British and German imperialism in Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim and short stories like ‘Falk’? His most interesting and ambivalent statements about the Germans are always articulated within a discourse on modernity, which presents itself in the shifting landscape of imperial spheres of influence (as opposed to straightforward colonial possessions). Technological progress (the steamship, the telegraph, the Suez 27

  See, for instance, Cecilia Björkén-Nyberg, ‘“Listening, listening”: Music and Gender in Howards End, Sinister Street and Pilgrimage’, in Michael J. Meyer (ed.), Literature and Music, Amsterdam, 2002, pp. 90–115. 28  Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper, Oxford, 1991, p. 5.

Introduction

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Canal) also impacted on the ways in which global empires could be administered and colonial markets commercially exploited; they changed the speed and flow of information between Europe and its colonial possessions, and consequently the ‘remoteness’ of those possessions and the reputations that were made and unmade by colonial conduct. This imperial modernity shapes Conrad’s modernist aesthetics29 as much as it accelerates his nostalgia for an earlier age of imperial certainties and, literally, ‘colonial fictions’. Conrad needs ‘the Germans’ to remind his English protagonists of the virtues of British imperialism and set them on the right course towards the pursuit of anachronistic heroic ideals, but these regressive transformations also become symptomatic of the Empire’s ideological unravelling in the face of the challenges of modernity. If for Conrad modernity amounted to a traumatic loss for which the Germans became a melancholic catalyst, his Edwardian contemporaries would find even more reasons to meet them with suspicion. At no other time in the history of AngloGerman relations did emotions run so high and antagonism so deep as in the febrile decade before the First World War.30 Early post-war analyses of this era31 invariably discussed the preliminaries to the conflict in terms of national psychopathologies which, at least in Britain, were aggravated by a host of concomitant concerns: eugenicist notions of physical and racial decline, the quest for national efficiency, concern about high levels of immigration, the militant agitations of the suffragette movement, concerns about the increasing dependence on foreign markets, the ‘liberal crisis’ and the ‘Social Question’, and the beginnings of colonial resistance. Rarely had ‘modernity’ looked so conflictual. It is all the more remarkable that, in such a climate of anxiety, E.M. Forster and Ford Madox Ford offered the largely positive representations of Germans considered in Chapter 2. Not only were those representations wrapped up in books about Englishness; they were also reflections on how modern the English (or the British) could be and become before they might lose some of their national characteristics. Howards End (1910) offers a range of positions on foreigners, colonial subjects, cosmopolitans, imperialists and ancient yeomen that suggest the complex, hybrid composition of ‘England’ and ‘Englishness’, irrespective of Forster’s nostalgia about national character and locale. In his earlier essays on Englishness – The Soul of London (1905), The Heart of the Country (1906), 29

  For a convincing analysis of how technology altered colonial practice and reverberates through Conrad’s technique in Lord Jim, see Michael Valdez Moses, ‘Disorientalism: Conrad and the Imperial Origins of Modernist Aesthetics’, in Richard Begam and Michael Valdez Moses (eds), Modernism and Colonialism: British and Irish Literature, 1899–1939, Durham, 2007, pp. 43–70. 30   For a magisterial, detailed analysis of pre-war Anglo-German political relations see Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise of Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860–1914, London, 1980. 31  See for instance J.A. Farrer, England Under Edward VIII, London, 1922. Caroline Playne, The Neuroses of the Nations, London, 1925, and The Pre-War Mind in Britain, London, 1928. Lowes Goldsworthy Dickinson, The International Anarchy, London, 1926.

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The Spirit of The People (1907) – the Anglo-German Ford had reached similar conclusions. For him hybridity and the power to assimilate were the strongest qualities of the English people; Englishness was the product of foreign influences, and in order to meet (German and American) modernity head on, the English had to rediscover how they transformed, incorporated and appropriated these influences into their national character. In this chapter I also deal with the kinds of stereotypes Edwardian society produced about Germans, from the Prussian Junker that populated Elizabeth von Arnim’s best-selling prose to the agents of cosmopolitanism about which Forster felt so uncertain: was cosmopolitanism an undesirable but inevitable product of imperialism or a necessary corollary of being cultured? Which type of modernity (imperial or artistic) could redeem the concomitant dilution of Englishness best? And what could a ‘German cosmopolitan’ connect that was beyond the reaches of the English imperialist? Chapter 3 deals with popular fiction by William Le Queux, Hector Hugh Munro (Saki) and John Buchan, which is often dismissed as rather dated invasion fantasy or genre fiction that has little relevance for modernism. Yet these novels endorse modernity quite forcefully – and much less equivocally or timidly than overtly modernist works. The modernity they demand is one that would enable England and its Empire to keep pace with Germany if not retain its pole position in the global race for power. Although these writers support imperialism they make it conditional, like Conrad, on fictions of legitimacy, amongst which national character ranks highest. Le Queux lets the English rediscover their original pluck but the resulting conflict with the Germans makes the two nations indistinguishable from one another. Buchan’s adventure stories endorse imperial masculine virtues but betray such alarming anxiety about modern (German) sexuality that these are swiftly projected onto the enemies. In their construction of the Beastly Hun, Le Queux and Buchan anticipate many of the tropes of First World War propaganda that unironically advocated extreme violence as a legitimate means to squash, crush and exterminate the sexualized German peril. In Saki’s radical critique When William Came (1913), however, empire is precisely what has weakened national character into effeminacy, complacency and degeneration. Unless the English become like the modern militarized Germans they will have to endure the shame of colonization. ‘The Germans’ are not the enemy, merely an external symptom of imperial decline and national degeneration. Chapter 4 tackles that degeneration of values and qualities in the analysis of Ford Madox Ford’s novel The Good Soldier (1915), most of which is set in the German spa town of Bad Nauheim. Rather than cure the ailing English gentleman of his weak heart, it highlights the sociopathology of Edwardian attitudes towards sex and national character. The literary trope of the German spa, so often used in nineteenth-century European and English fiction, is one way of dealing with the sexual allure of foreign bodies, or with desires most foreign to the English novel. The German spa is a thinly medicalized sexual market-place that has a firm place in the social calendar of the upper and upper middle classes. Ford’s novel gathers together modern Americans and modern Englishmen to observe their unravelling

Introduction

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precisely because modern Germany corporealizes existence: it services social and sexual desires within a medical context. The corporeal elements of modernity in early twentieth-century Germany are the focus of Chapter 5, which analyses the ways in which Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence respond to the German body as a grotesque phenomenon. The frequent association with Germans and the pleasures of consumption coincides with a shift from a late-Victorian industrial society still focused on production to an early twentieth-century economy increasingly organized around abundance. Production is the issue for Lawrence; Woolf is troubled by consumption, particularly the perception of excessive consumption and the consuming gaze. Her journey to Germany in 1909 focused her attention on German bodies and, more importantly, on her own body and its inadequacies. In Mrs Dalloway (1925) the taxonomy of disappearing, ageing bodies, ailing bodies and conspicuous bodies once again has national signifiers attached to it, complicated by Woolf’s problematic views about class. While her critique of eugenic ideas has long been recognized in the ironic portrayal of the medical establishment in the novel, her characterization of Doris Kilman demonstrates considerable ambivalence about the social and physical corollaries of modernity for women. Lawrence’s critique of modernity in Women in Love (1920) and the various versions of the Chatterley novels is predicated on the way in which High Capitalism redefined the body as a machine, a mechanistic tool within a relentless ideology of production whose metaphors percolated into medical and cultural discourses. I place Lawrence’s rejection of mechanical masculinity as a consequence of both modern sexuality and modern industrial methods in the context of pre-war hybrid movements like the Werkbund and Weimar health culture. The grotesque bodies in Lawrence and Woolf are representations of a ‘bad’ modernity but they are also symptomatic of the impossibility of English bodies to obtain pleasure or to be represented as capable of pleasure. While Chapter 5 deals with the English gaze at the grotesque German body, Chapter 6 charts a remarkable transformation in the signification of that gaze from a ‘bad’ modernity to a futuristic, regenerative modernity. Travel writing, reportage and fiction by Christopher Isherwood and Stevie Smith about 1930s Germany demonstrates a singular fascination with Nazi corporeality as the symptom of national rebirth that focuses a nostalgic longing for the adaptation of such foreign achievements at home. These longings are also brought into sharper focus by an acute awareness of pressing domestic problems and – again – imperial crisis. The lure of the fascist body (and of fascism) becomes clear in the way in which it affects the English body, animating it, seducing it into participation in Nazi semiotics. The fascist appeal results in the willing subjection of English bodies to German dominance, an image that symbolizes the whole ambivalence of the perception of Nazi physique: a nostalgia for the superiority of imperial dominance and a desire for relief from the white man’s burden of dominating. Chapter 7 takes us into the mythologized landscape of the London Blitz only to demonstrate that the wartime fiction of Graham Greene and Elizabeth Bowen

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does not establish clear boundaries between the historic enemies. They do the very opposite, probing for those elements in British culture that lend themselves to fascist adaptation and point to the similarities between British imperialism and Nazi ideology, between the fictions of propaganda and the fictions of romance. Both writers present modern subjectivity as a series of chosen and imposed fictions that are tested and transformed by military conflict but not substantiated or made real in any simplistic way. Bowen and Greene represent pre-war and wartime Britain as resting on obsolete and tired assumptions that war not only explodes but also gives opportunity to redress. Fighting for a better future by state-sanctioned violence, however, surely is an uncanny reminder of Nazi war aims, and it certainly makes the very homes that were defamiliarized by air raids and incendiary bombs even more strange? The way in which Bowen and Greene treat espionage and treason in The Ministry of Fear (1943) and The Heat of the Day (1948) predicts the myth of the Blitz and concomitant myths about the war tethered to ‘national character’ that will shore up modern post-war national identity. Although ‘the Germans’ remain indispensable for these narrative and cultural constructs of Englishness, they also become increasingly less visible and are hardly mentioned in either novel, although the war is ostensibly all about repelling them. This is a symptom of the fact that none of the books analysed here is really about ‘the Germans’, least of all the war novels. The Germans are merely a useful conduit for more or less anxiously negotiating Englishness and England’s place in a modern world. Once myth assigns ‘the Germans’ a place in the popular memory of the Second World War, and once the war becomes a cornerstone in English identity, meanings are hard to shift and quite impervious to revision. They survive the disintegration of the British Empire, and – just – the fall of Communism, the end of the Cold War and political processes of devolution. But in the transition from memory to post-memory, from ‘remembering’ to re-imagining, there is now evidence of a renewed interest in the cultural meanings of that war and how it produced a concept of national identity that may no longer be useful in a post9/11 world. Unsurprisingly, these books too are full of ‘Germans’ (some of them surprisingly ‘good’). That contemporary nexus of modernity and national identity, however, is an altogether different story.

Chapter 1

‘A Sickening Suggestion of Common Guilt’ German Renegades and English Heroes in Conrad’s Fiction Lord Jim is arguably Joseph Conrad’s most oblique narrative about British imperialism; a novel that enacts his ambivalence through the intricate rhetorical manoeuvres of his narrator Marlow. In Heart of Darkness, Marlow had criticized the divergence of colonial ideals and imperialist practice through the hybrid figure of Kurtz with his half-French, half-English origins, a German-sounding name and barely obscured allusions to the Belgian regime in the Congo. Although ‘all of Europe had contributed to the making of Kurtz, it is the Englishman Marlow who is ‘trying to account to myself for – for – Mr Kurtz – the shade of Mr Kurtz’; and, one would like to add, to his falling under Kurtz’s spell. Marlow’s haunting narrative on board the Nellie appears to testify to an Englishman’s willingness to scrutinize colonial endeavours for their moral import. It is the compulsion to account for himself and for others that characterizes Marlow and underlies all of his narrative projects, from ‘Youth’ to Chance. The Novalis epigraph to Lord Jim (‘It is certain my Conviction gains infinitely, the moment another soul will believe in it’) encapsulates Marlow’s dialogic and discursive effort to share his belief in characters and ideologies he nonetheless has reason to subject to intense inquiry. At the core of Marlow’s narrative endeavour, then, lies a recurring doubt in the imperial project that must be assuaged by a restitutive counter-discourse of ‘Conviction’, which the implied listener must be persuaded to share unless the British Empire is to lose its legitimacy. This listener and contemporary reader is the subscriber to Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, disseminator to a limited but influential conservative class of colonial fiction and ideology, on whose ongoing support Conrad’s income as a writer was then highly dependent. His audience largely consisted of advocates of the British Empire who were unlikely to question   The regime was Belgian, but German investment in its exploitation made the Congo a more successful business venture than any of the official German territories and settler colonies. See Blackbourn, Fontana History of Germany, p. 334.    Joseph Conrad, Youth/Heart of Darkness, The End of the Tether, ed. John Lyon, Harmondsworth, 1995, p. 109. Subsequent references to this edition are cited parenthetically in the text.    For an illuminating analysis of Conrad’s early twentieth-century fiction in the context of the writing published in Blackwood’s see William Atkinson, ‘Bound in Blackwood’s:

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colonial orthodoxies: ‘I write novels to amuse the English,’ he conceded to a Polish relative in 1898. Lord Jim is conspicuous among Conrad’s œuvre for the peculiar relationship between narrator and protagonist, which is sustained by the ideal of the English gentleman and a set of collective and corporate identities (the Merchant Navy, the British Empire, white supremacy) that overlap in Marlow’s oft-repeated phrase ‘he was one of us’. In no other narrative is Conrad so anxious to emphasize the national identity of his protagonist as synonymous with the integrity of the British Empire, despite, or perhaps because of, Jim’s repeated failure to fulfil heroic and professional ideals. As both Kathryn Tidrick and Daniel Bivona have argued, ‘English character’ as a complex assumption of racial qualities and beliefs lies at the heart of the legitimizing fictions of the British Empire and its paternalistic mission. Other national identities are dramatized in opposition to Jim, notably the Patna’s German skipper Gustav So-and-So and his counterpart in the Patusan episode, the lepidopterist and merchant Stein. What precisely do the Germans stand for in Lord Jim and other contemporary tales such as ‘The End of the Tether’ ([1901] 1903) and ‘Falk’ (1904), and what do they tell us about Conrad’s complex attitude to national identity and modernity? It is perhaps no coincidence that the novel unravels British imperialism at the very historical moment when the Germans enter the colonial arena, 1883–86. I would suggest that Marlow’s endeavour to dissociate Jim and himself from the rogue elements in the Empire, the Gentleman Browns and the Gustav So-and-Sos, is constantly subverted by ‘a vein of subtle reference to their common blood, an assumption of common experience; a sickening suggestion of common guilt, of secret knowledge that was like a bond of their minds and of their hearts’ (387). This rhetoric of identification runs through the novel as a persistent challenge to otherwise carefully maintained constructs of difference between agents of redeeming imperialism and representatives of calculating profit. National character was indeed a topic increasingly discussed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, often in conjunction with anthropological and racial ideas and certainly under the looming shadow of dreaded ‘degeneration’. The fact that it was publicly debated at all, rather than simply assumed, suggests that, in an era of global commerce, international transport networks and largescale immigration, it could no longer be taken for granted that it actually existed The Imperialism of “The Heart of Darkness” in its Immediate Context’, Twentieth-Century Literature, 50/4 (2004): 368–93.    Joseph Conrad, The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, 1861–1924, ed. Frederick Karl and Laurence Davies, 9 vols, Cambridge, 1983–2007, vol. 2, p. 55.    Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim, ed. John Batchelor, Oxford, 1993, p. 43. Subsequent references to the novel are cited parenthetically in the text.    See Kathryn Tidrick, Empire and the English Character, London, 1992. Daniel Bivona, British Imperial Literature, 1870–1940: Writing and the Administration of Empire, Cambridge, 1998.

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other than in the unchallenged tropes of adventure fiction and boys’ literature or in expedient political rhetoric. Disciplines that had initially relied on national character in the nineteenth century – eugenics, anthropology and ethnography, Darwinism, historiography and politics – now made its definition difficult and controversial. Bishop Creighton’s lecture on The English National Character (1896) implied that it was in contradistinction to other European powers that England discovered its identity and superiority. More than geopolitical vicissitude, insularity was thus elevated to a national character epitomized by independence and individuality. However, this traditional reasoning left England’s manifest destiny in question at a time when increasing industrial and commercial competition showed up England’s weaker performance in important sectors such as social security, education and the all-important steel production. Charles Pearson’s sensational National Life and Character (1893) prophesied a gloomy future for the Anglo-Saxon race, stated its lack of suitability for tropical climes and dared contemplate the rise of the black races. In the other camp, Benjamin Kidd’s popular Social Evolution (1898) argued that the Anglo-Saxons were precisely the race that had emerged supreme from the struggle for existence, which justified their global empire through biological, ethical and intellectual superiority. And yet Germany’s industrial strength, colonial ambitions and scientific advances suggested that this position of dominance seemed less secure than such an interpretation of Social Darwinist ideas implied. It would take the scandals of the Second Boer War (1899–1902) to promote the ideology of ‘national efficiency’ that commended German and Japanese models of organization for British adaptation.10 In the light of serious competition from Germany and the USA, even the staunchest advocates of empire resorted to rhetoric that would seek to maintain the habits of superiority even if it meant that Britain might have to share its position with others on the grounds of racial affinity: in 1898 and 1899, the Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain argued in favour of a triple entente between Germany, the USA and Britain as a natural alliance between ‘the Teutonic race and the two great branches of the Anglo-Saxon’ because ‘the main character of the Teutonic race differ[ed] very slightly indeed from the character of the Anglo-Saxon’.11 Sceptics of such arguments emphasized that Germany had achieved its eminence and national cohesion through a reliance on organicist and corporate models that were rooted in collectivism, submission and militarism as key elements of the German national character. These traits stood in direct opposition to the independence, self-reliance and individualism so cherished by the English and celebrated as hero worship   Mandell Creighton, The English National Character, London, 1896, pp. 10, 28ff.   Charles E. Pearson, National Life and Character, London, 1913, p. 89.    Cited in Peter Mandler, The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair, New Haven, 2006, p. 120. 10  See G.R. Searle, The Quest for National Efficiency, Oxford, 1971, pp. 54–106. 11   Mr Chamberlain at Leicester, The Times, 1 December 1899, p. 7.  

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among the conservative elite at the time.12 Yet hero worship and the heroic ideal in itself are increasingly symptomatic of an Empire in decline and therefore in search of heroic men who in Lord Jim cling to imperial ideals rather than ever see them actualized. Indeed, much of the quandary in Marlow’s response to Jim lies in his reluctance to concede the obsolescence or at least the deficiency of national character as a legitimizing fiction for Empire. ‘One of Us’? Lord Jim, Corporate Identity and Discursive Community ‘One of us’ is the refrain that runs through Lord Jim as Marlow’s repeated reassurance about Jim’s identity. Precisely who is ‘us’ in ‘one of us’? Does the meaning of this phrase and the community it implies really remain ‘roughly consistent’ as Ian Watt claims,13 or does Marlow’s difficulty in coming to terms with Jim-as-‘one of us’, Jim as an English gentleman ultimately suggest that some of the values of the implied communities are perhaps only so much empty rhetoric? Collective and socially constructed identity are very important in Lord Jim as hallmarks of the British Empire and its institutions, notably the Merchant Navy in which Jim serves and which is implicated in the trade that makes Empire such a lucrative venture. The officers who judge Jim harshly emphasize professional and racial identity as the very force by which the values of the service can be policed. The ponderous French lieutenant reminds Marlow of the importance of ‘the eyes of others’, while the impeccable Captain Brierley is highly aware of what a British officer ‘is supposed to be’ vis à vis ‘all these confounded natives, serangs, lascars, quartermasters. […] We are an organised body of men, and the only thing that holds us together is just the name for that kind of decency’ (67–8.). What is at stake for Brierley in Jim’s public trial for dereliction of duty is not just an individual’s failure but the reputation of a corporate institution that supports the legitimacy of Empire through the superior values and skills of white men. If the appearance of values legitimizes empire, we should not be surprised if for Marlow Jim’s demeanour seems sufficient indication of the redeeming purity of his intentions, of his ‘spirit’: I liked his appearance; I knew his appearance; he came from the right place, he was one of us. He stood there for all the parentage of his kind, for men and women by no means clever or amusing, but whose very existence is based upon honest faith, and upon the instinct of courage. […] he was outwardly so typical of that good, stupid kind we like to feel marching right and left of us in life, of the kind that is not disturbed by the vagaries of intelligence and the perversions of – of nerves, let us say. He was the kind of fellow you would, on the strength of

 See Mandler, English National Character, p.135.  Ian Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, London, 1980, p. 12.

12 13

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his looks, leave in charge of the deck – figuratively and professionally speaking. (43–4.)

Here Conrad offers one of the reasons for Marlow’s ineluctable empathy. It is the phenomenology of English imperialism in its corporate representatives that justifies the claim to superiority. His need to believe in Jim – or to construct a Jim he can believe in – is far more important than what Jim actually is: clearly not someone whom one can leave in charge on any deck nor someone who, good and stupid, possesses ‘the instinct of courage’ undisturbed by either intelligence or nerves. Kipling underlined the importance of empire by demanding the services of a racial elite in ‘The White Man’s Burden’ (1899): ‘Send forth the best ye breed’. In this context, Conrad’s ambivalence in Lord Jim is a notable critique of national and racial character and it unmasks ‘character’ as a legitimizing fiction for an Empire that also serves as a welcome receptacle for outsiders and outcasts, exiles and nomads. As C.F.G. Masterman would argue shortly in his cultural critique The Condition of England (1909), it was the English middle class in its ‘elemental unrest […] as an inheritance from an ancestry of criminals and adventurers’ that predominantly ventured out into the Empire.14 The imperial ‘organised body of men’ in Conrad’s novel is from the very beginning of the narrative already compromised by this disreputable fringe that increasingly populates the novel – and imperial territory.15 Early on the anonymous omniscient narrator characterizes these elements as loafers and shirkers with a ‘horror of the home service with its harder conditions, severer view of duty, and the hazard of stormy oceans’: they prefer soft jobs and easy billets, large native crews and non-white ship owners, resting their questionable authority on ‘the distinction of being white’ (13). The narrator’s verdict on this white colony is not as harsh as Stevenson’s on the white beachcombers and rogue traders in ‘The Beach of Falesá’ (1892) or ‘The Ebb Tide’ (1893–94), nor have these men ‘gone native’ in the manner of Kayerts or Kurtz in ‘An Outpost of Progress’ (1897) and Heart of Darkness. Yet under the peaceful Eastern sky they sure enough have been subject to a climatic and quasiracial transculturation because, ‘thrown there by accident’, they were cut loose from the ‘home service’. This service supposedly inures against the contaminating influence of lesser cultures and races, no matter how permeable the benighted people themselves might be to the white man’s civilizing influence. Impervious Englishness must remain a hallmark of racial and national superiority, propagated by the tropes of adventure fiction and travel writing.16 However, that the decivilizing threat can only be averted by strict discipline is an indication of how thin   C.F.G. Masterman, The Condition of England, London, 1960, p. 15.  On the more insalubrious elements of the merchant marine and the navy in the Far East see George Woodcock, The British in the Far East, London, 1969, pp. 31–2, p. 44. 16  See Andrea White, Joseph Conrad and the Adventure Tradition: Constructing and Deconstructing the Imperial Subject, Cambridge, 1993, p. 23. 14 15

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the veneer of ‘civilization’ actually is, and how brittle its legitimacy. It is through contact with this ‘insubstantial’ but ‘fascinating’ white body of men that Jim gives up the idea of returning home (and rejoining home service) and takes a berth on the Patna, presumably his ‘soft job’. If the loafers’ moral decay has compromised Jim, he nonetheless thinks himself immune from this moribund streak. Even if ‘those men did not belong to the world of heroic adventure; they weren’t bad chaps though. Even the skipper himself […] The quality of these men did not matter; he rubbed shoulders with them, but they could not touch him’ (24–5). This attitude is echoed by Brierley and Marlow as well. Big Brierley admits: ‘We’ve got all kinds amongst us – some anointed scoundrels in the lot; but, hang it, we must preserve professional decency or we become no better than so many tinkers going about loose’ (68). The crucial word here is ‘preserve’ – the means by which this professional decency is upheld are not just strict discipline (as opposed to some mysterious ‘instinct of courage’) but the construction of a public reputation for a vital corporate body that somehow tolerates ‘anointed scoundrels’ but would suffer irreparably from the necessity of an official investigation into its practices. For it is the public nature of an inquiry about a white officer that promotes the damaging gossip about the Englishman Jim’s failure whereas the cowardly German captain flies into space like a witch on a broomstick never to be heard of again. Indeed, the merchant marine has become ‘loose’ enough to accommodate someone of the German skipper’s girth and temperament, whose escape rests on the notion that ‘the Pacific is big […]. I am well aquaindt in Apia, in Honolulu’ (41).17 Marlow’s response to the captain’s plans is a concession of just how ‘loose’ the Empire’s standards can be: I won’t make a secret of it that I had been ‘aquaindt’ with not a few of that sort myself. There are times when a man must act as though life were equally sweet in any company. I’ve known such a time, and, what’s more, I shan’t now pretend to pull a long face over my necessity, because a good many of that bad company from want of moral – moral – what shall I say? – posture, or from some other equally profound cause, were twice as instructive and twenty times more amusing than the usual respectable thief of commerce you fellows ask to sit at your table without any real necessity – from habit, from cowardice, from goodnature, from a hundred sneaking and inadequate reasons. (41)

17

  For the historical background to German imperial ambition in the Pacific see Peter Hempenstall, Grundzüge der samoanischen Geschichte in der Zeit der deutschen Herrschaft in Hermann Josef Hiery (ed.), Die deutsche Südsee, 1884–1914, Paderborn, 2001, pp. 690– 711 and Arthur Knoll and Lewis Gann (eds), Germans in the Tropics: Essays in German Colonial History, London, 1987. For a comparative reading of British and German colonial policy in the Pacific see Hermann J. Hiery and John M. MacKenzie (eds), European Impact and Pacific Influence: British and German Colonial Policy in the Pacific Islands and the Indigenous Response, London, 1997.

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Note how Marlow’s explanation rests again on phenomenology: he will not ‘pretend’ now but was capable of ‘acting’ then, while his bad company was merely wanting in moral ‘posture’ rather than moral fibre. Implicating his audience in the more sordid compromises of the global economy did not go unchecked in Heart of Darkness, where his listeners on the Nellie reminded him to ‘be civil’ (189). But nowhere in the earlier novella is Marlow as confused and aggressive as he is in this passage, accusing his audience of hypocrisy, of ‘sneaky and inadequate reasons’ or some obscure ‘necessity’ that condone exploitation. This is where Marlow’s rhetorical impasse lies in Lord Jim: if he renders the collective identity of ‘us’ more and more accommodating in order to deny his readers the possibility of condemning Jim, he crucially undermines the parallel project of contrasting Jim’s idealism with the moral depravity of imperial renegades like the racist Gustav, the slave-trading Chester and the looting desperado Brown. What these three characters clearly do not possess is any purity of motives such as habitually legitimizes British imperialism irrespective of its bloodier side, or what Marlow calls ‘the spirit’ in Lord Jim (43) and ‘the idea’ in Heart of Darkness: The conquest of the Earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look at it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence of an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea – something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer sacrifice to […]. (52)

The encounter with Kurtz ironizes Marlow’s confidence in imperialist ideology, but this irony depends on the reader’s ability and willingness to make connections between Marlow’s vague ‘idea’ and Kurtz’s homicidal ‘power for good’ (110). As Daniel Bivona has argued persuasively, Marlow’s ambivalence in Heart of Darkness constructs a cautionary tale about renegades like Kurtz while also distancing himself from those who adhere to the ideological and corporate codes and rules Kurtz has violated.18 Let us remember that this apostrophe is directed at his middle-class listeners on the Nellie and Conrad’s conservative Maga audience. The letter in which he first mentions Heart of Darkness to his editor William Blackwood includes a tactful note about ‘whether the subject will commend itself to you for that number’ – Maga’s celebratory millennial number, certain of particular attention and popularity. He continues with the well-known statement: The criminality of inefficiency and pure selfishness when tackling the civilising work in Africa is a justifiable idea. It is of our time distinc[t]ly – though not topically treated. It is a story as much as my Outpost of Progress was but,

 See Bivona, British Imperial Literature, pp. 106–11.

18

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so to speak ‘takes in’ more – is a little wider – is less concentrated upon individuals.19

Both a justification and an indictment of imperialism (civilizing missions versus criminality), this strategy allows Conrad (and Marlow) to criticize the rogue practice of poor colonialists as long as this does not impinge on the dominant ideology itself. ‘I remain’, he seems to reassure Blackwood, ‘one of us’. This rhetorical manoeuvring embodies precisely what Benita Parry has identified as Conrad’s ambivalent and at times contradictory attitude to imperialism. His comment on style serves the same purpose: it predicts a much wider critique than can be pinned on the odd miscreant individual but will be suitably presented in such an obfuscated, indirect manner that the critique can easily be missed. As he wrote to his socialist friend Cunningham Graham, this justifiable idea of imperialist critique is ‘so wrapped up in secondary notions that even you may miss it’,20 and therefore Conrad does not alienate the publisher and readership he financially depends on. The cloaking and clogging effect of ‘secondary notions’ reminds me of Freud’s concept of the ‘secondary process’ in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), an unconscious editing that amounts to self-censorship21 by which dreams are made more coherent but less threatening, particularly in the act of retelling them.22 Conrad’s narrative strategies of ‘wrapping up’ and occlusion manifest themselves in Marlow’s ambivalent rhetoric of convenient digression and casual incrimination; of exoneration and sly detachment.23 How important these strategies are for Conrad and his readership becomes clear when we compare the succès d’estime of his work with the poor response to Stevenson’s South Sea Tales in the early 1890s, in which the international celebrity made no concessions at all to the contemporary demands for exoticized imperial romance and confronted his audience with a less subtle critique of cultural imperialism and some of the most sordid characters in colonial fiction.24 Marlow’s storytelling and evidence-gathering in Lord Jim is a counter-discourse that attempts to wrap up or ‘censor’ the other ‘talk’ about Jim that precedes Marlow’s narrative: the anonymous reader’s harsher judgement of Jim; the legal discourse of the official inquiry; the ‘amazing Jim myth’ (280) that begins to circulate about his time in Patusan; and most effectively, the gossip of ‘that scandal of the Eastern   Conrad, Collected Letters, vol. 2, pp. 139–40.  Ibid., p. 157. 21   For a classic reading of Marlow’s strategies see Albert J. Guerard, Conrad the Novelist, Cambridge, Mass., 1958, Ch. 5. 22  Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, Standard Edition, ed. and trans. James Strachey, vol. 5, London, 1968, pp. 601–602. 23  See Bivona, British Imperial Literature, Ch. 4. 24   For the critical response to and the posthumous neglect of Stevenson’s fictional and non-fictional work on the Pacific see also Roslyn Jolly’s introduction to Robert Louis Stevenson, South Sea Tales, Oxford, 1996, pp. xxviii ff. 19 20

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seas’ (151) that spreads like wildfire across the Eastern seaport and follows him to the outposts of the Empire. This gossip is perhaps the most powerful and damning discourse because it is both self-regulatory for the merchant community as well as entirely beyond any official control of appearances and reputations. If ‘the spirit’ redeems Jim, then Marlow’s tale mythologizes Jim as ‘one of us’ in the manner of a conservative tale about English character and empire, even if that spirit is crucially motivated by a ‘superb egoism’ that results in a spectacular delusion about professional competence (413). But if Jim is ultimately not ‘good enough’, if ‘no one is’ in Marlow’s empathetic estimation, then the British Empire’s ‘shadowy ideals of conduct’ (416) are surely reduced to mere legitimizing fictions of political expediency? ‘One of Them?’ Secondary Notions and National Character If Jim’s and Marlow’s Englishness is important for the imperialist ideals the novel defends and associates with the corporate agencies of the Empire – ‘we exist only insofar as we hang together’ (223) – how important is national character in the light of the internationalism of Conrad’s fictional Eastern world? The Jeddah scandal of 1880, on which the Patna incident is based, involved an English captain, Joseph Lucas Clark, and an English first officer, A.P. Williams. First officer Campbell of the Antenor furnished the basis for the French lieutenant, and the German romantic adventurer-turned-merchant Stein has his origins in the naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace (whose The Malay Archipelago (1894) Conrad read alongside the work of Hugh Clifford) and his assistant Charles Allen.25 The Jeddah affair, then, is an entirely English scandal, and one that outraged the public and seafaring community at home and in the Empire: ‘we sincerely trust that no Englishman was amongst the boatload of cowards that left the Jeddah and her thousand passengers to shift for themselves’, cried the Daily Chronicle when vague news of the incident first reached London.26 That the Jeddah had been in the hands of an English crew was clearly read as a national embarrassment. Questions were asked in Parliament as to the unequal treatment of native passengers and Europeans. Conrad, however, avails himself of a German captain whose blatant racism and physical grotesqueness indicate severe moral deficiencies from the start. Norman Sherry has argued that the Germanization of the Jeddah’s captain ensures the reader’s sympathy with Jim so that he is seen to be ‘of a different nature’, as if national character represented 25  See Norman Sherry, Conrad’s Eastern World, Cambridge, 1966, pp. 41–65 and Appendix C, also pp. 141–7. For more extensive documentation of the Jeddah inquiry see the sources in Thomas C. Moser’s second Norton edition of Lord Jim. The famous German naturalist Dr Bernstein, whom Wallace mentions, lends Conrad’s fictitious German part of his name, but is converted into ‘a Dutch traveler – a rather famous name’ (250). For more possible sources on Malaya see Sherry, p. 141. 26   Cited in Sherry, Conrad’s Eastern World, p. 62.

26

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an essence of quality.27 This de-Anglicization of the Jeddah affair is perhaps one of Conrad’s most obvious ‘secondary notions’ in the novel which focuses attention on individual rather than a collective failure, for there are two other Englishmen, Brierley and Stanton, who prove themselves worthy of the Merchant Navy albeit at the cost of their lives. Marlow’s discursive strategy of empathy also erodes the very difference on which Jim’s ‘redemption’ nonetheless depends, as if the narrative unconscious constantly unpicks the wrappings of secondary notions. The German captain is called ‘a hound’ (41) in the confrontation with the harbour master, an epithet that Marlow and the other officers of the Patna overhear on the nearby esplanade. This scene is paralleled with the confrontation between Jim and Marlow outside the court building when Jim mistakenly believes an anonymous comment about some villagers’ yellow dog to be Marlow’s verdict on him: ‘wretched cur’ (70). Both are ‘dogs’ because they do not abide by the codes of conduct that legitimize the superiority of an imperial institution. Jim confronts Marlow because he would accept abuse and sanctioning in court but not outside it, as if the inquiry’s verdict left his honour as a gentleman untouched;28 conversely a German’s dereliction would not reflect on the Empire’s values precisely because it does not challenge the values connoted with ‘Englishness’. The secondary notion here is to revert to individual or national identity when failure would reflect on the collective body in whose service both the German and the Englishman stand. Yet making this distinction between the German and the Englishman comes at the price of reducing the credibility and effectiveness of the Empire’s self-regulating judiciary. If the German skipper lightly dismisses the harbour master’s abuse and the legal sanction of withdrawing his certificate, it is because he knows that it carries little meaning in the current marketplace of expansive imperialism in which the British Merchant Navy is no longer the only employer. The trader and lepidopterist Stein, who sends Jim to Patusan as his agent, is often seen as a benign counterbalance to the grotesque Gustav.29 Stein supposedly stands for the pre-Bismarckian Germany, the loose conglomerate of principalities 27  Sherry, Conrad’s Eastern World, p. 47. Parry argues that the function of all peripheral characters connected to trade, adventure or colonial service is to distinguish Jim’s adherence to the dominant ideology of imperialist mission from their violation of this moral consensus. Benita Parry, Conrad and Imperialism: Ideological Boundaries and Visionary Frontiers, London, 1983, pp. 88–9. 28   According to David Trotter, Jim’s delusion elevates private judgment above official jurisprudence although the latter has power to define or deny professional identities. David Trotter, Paranoid Modernism: Literary Experiment, Psychosis, and the Professionalization of English Society, Oxford, 2001, pp. 174–5. 29  See, for instance, Firchow, Death of German Cousin, pp. 56ff. For a range of possible intertextual references to German literature in Stein’s statements see Firchow; Paul Kirschner, ‘Conrad, Goethe and Stein: The Romantic Fate in Lord Jim’, Ariel, 10/1 (1979): 65–81.

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without a unified nation state or the imperialist agenda of Weltpolitik – a cultural entity rather than a political power. He is dissociated from stereotypical Prussian militarism by making him a romantic Bavarian who gets involved in the 1848 revolutions, has to flee his country and embarks on adventures in Malaya that recommend him to Jim’s propensity for dreams of heroic action, ‘like something you read of in books’ (234). As Frederic Jameson has argued, Stein’s career actually traces the way in which the colonial adventure degenerates into a modern commercial enterprise30: the revolutionary turns wealthy merchant and collector, and the English agent he sends out to establish an interior trading post after pacifying warring native factions is principally a functionary in his growing capitalist realm. This strategy of setting up residents or agencies echoes the way in which informal control in Malaya extended British influence without involving government authority or money.31 This ‘informal’ model was also the one Bismarck advocated in his reluctant endorsement of German colonial expansion: Stein is a classic representative of contemporary German business interests at work in the background of German and British colonial projects.32 Jim’s attire of white helmet, canvas leggings and carefully clay-whitened shoes is perhaps a makeshift version of the white rajah (with connotations of the imperial hero James Brooke), but it also positions him much closer to the grotesque, dubious figures of the pyjama-clad Gustav So-and-So and the ragged Gentleman Brown. The latter is a Stevensonian rogue, rumoured to have been in the secret pay of wealthy copra merchants33 who fled the South Seas because they became a battleground for conflicting imperial interests, full of ‘High commissioners, consuls, men of war, and international control’ (353). Indeed, the encounter with Brown undoes Jim the way his dereliction unravels Brierley, as Philip Weinstein argues.34 Gustav Morf, in an early Freudian reading of Lord Jim, saw Jim’s paralysis vis-à-vis Brown as

  Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, London, 1983, p. 238. 31   Tidrick, Empire and the English Character, pp. 89 and 97. 32   Conrad worked for one such firm himself: the Stuttgart-based shipping merchant Barr, Moering & Co. in London. 33   Well-known German firms such as Godeffroy & Son had invested in copra trade in the South Seas and monopolized it from 1857 to 1879 when the house went bankrupt. Like Stein, Godeffroy imported exotic artifacts, which quickly led to the establishment of the Godeffroy Museum in Hamburg; its collections are now part of Hamburg’s Museum of Ethnology. See Mary Evelyn Townsend, The Rise and Fall of Germany’s Colonial Empire, 1884–1918, New York, 1966, pp. 48–9. W.O. Henderson, The German Colonial Empire, 1884­–1919, London, 1993, pp. 135–7. Stevenson was fiercely critical of the way in which the German firm’s mismanagement and aggression escalated conflicts in Samoa, although he credited some administrators with good intentions; A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa, London, 1967, pp. 28, 54ff. , 97ff. 34   Philip M. Weinstein, The Semantics of Desire, Princeton, 1984, p. 160. 30

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the result of unconscious identification with him.35 There is good evidence for this reading, but perhaps more important is that Brown, like Gustav and Chester, is what Masterman would see as an agent of degenerate modernity who strips the veneer off Jim’s heroic fictions and reveals them as spectral, unfeasible and disastrous for the native population. He crucially dismantles Jim’s ‘work’ as an ideological pretence composed of paternalistic rhetoric (‘responsibility’, ‘innocent lives’, ‘duty’; 282) that obscures the same end – exploitation. Insinuating ‘their common blood, an assumption of common experience; a sickening suggestion of common guilt, of secret knowledge that was like a bond of their minds and of their hearts’ (387), what, then, in practical terms is the difference between Jim’s presence in Patusan – hoarding gunpowder, fortifying stockades, securing ‘free trade’ – and the much derided influence of rival European powers in the global marketplace that Conrad resented so much?36 ‘German Influence’: Materialist Modernity and the Dissipation of ‘National Spirit’ The Patusan part of Lord Jim is a flight from an untenable moral consensus at odds with utilitarian imperialist modernity into the ostensible safety of earlier forms of colonial experience.37 A break in genre from modernist impressionism  Gustav Morf, The Polish Heritage of Joseph Conrad, London, 1930, pp. 157–8.  There is, however, a different way of reading the encounter between Jim and Brown that takes into account Conrad’s Polish background. Conrad also uses the phrase ‘common guilt’ in ‘Autocracy and War’ (1905) to refer to Germany and Russia in relation to the partition of Poland that dematerialized Polishness into revolutionary national spirit. When Jim and Brown encounter each other across a divide, Brown becomes Jim’s ‘evil counsellor’ suggesting a common past and common interests in exploitation, in shared loot, just as Conrad accuses Prussia of being the ‘evil counsellor’ of Russia; Joseph Conrad, ‘Autocracy and War’, Notes on Life and Letters, London, 1949, p. 95. Could we see a parallel between the conservative ideals of the Polish szlachta class, in their claim to the stewardship of an independent Poland, and Jim’s romantic heroism? (Watt also suggests parallels between Conrad’s officer status aboard ship and his privileged social status in Poland; Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, p. 20.) Patusan sinks into disarray after Brown’s violent intrusion and Jim’s failure of stewardship, and Conrad’s Poland was kept alive in spirit by revolutionary factions that affiliated themselves to anachronistic ideals without much support from the majority. Gustav Morf suggests that Jim’s leap from the Patna might be read as a working through of Conrad’s guilt about abandoning Poland; Polish Heritage, p. 163. Could Jim’s governance of Patusan be a similar ‘working through’ of the fate of Poland? 37  Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan sees the Patusan episode as ‘a regression’ into the heroicmythical mode of narrative that offers an alternative to his ‘shattered self’ in the modern world. For her, narrative mode also represents Conrad’s anxious response to the modern world; Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper, Oxford, 1991, p. 47. Benita Parry suggests that Conrad’s borrowing from adventure tradition is not a nostalgic impulse but ‘a utopian 35

36

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to exotic romance, the narrative also takes refuge, via Marlow’s strategies, in the invocations of individual fate or inscrutable psychology in order to avoid uneasy conclusions about the British imperial project.38 Jim’s accommodation to the world of Patusan lies in its location beyond the ambit of modernity, outside the reaches of modern communication (telegraph) and transport (steam or mail boats) and in its greater proximity to his heroic dreams. It is not the character who undergoes some evolutionary backsliding to a de-civilized state, as Kurtz does in Heart of Darkness, but the text itself, whose veer towards the adventure genre performs a return to more familiar and ostensibly more clear-cut moral scenarios: the lone white man venturing into hostile native territory. Whether Gentleman Brown represents modern ‘rapacious strangers’ (390) and new imperialism’s degenerate greed, or whether he is indeed the hidden truth behind heroic colonial ideals to which Jim lends the Boy Scout idiom, his intrusion finally dooms Jim’s last effort at rescuing ‘the spirit’ from the forces of modernity. Conrad was certainly concerned about intruding modernity, specifically in the form of emerging new imperialist powers and their competition with the British Empire for influence in the Far East, notably the United States, Russia and Germany. Unlike Britain, the new imperialists could not benefit from a centuries-old tradition of colonial experience or the ‘deep-seated convictions of the race – the expansive force of its enterprise and its morality’.39 For the author of Lord Jim, these new powers were interfering with British prerogatives that were justified by national ideals; in 1899 English civilization and ‘morality’ were by implication higher and more benign than Dutch, Belgian, American, Russian or German.40 When Marlow enters the offices of The Company in Heart of Darkness he comments on a map of the world marked with the colours of imperial powers: ‘There was a vast amount of red – good to see at any time, because one knows that some real work is done in there, a deuce of a lot of blue, a little green, smears of orange, and, on the East Coast, a purple patch, to show where the jolly pioneers of progress drink the jolly lagerurge to transfigure still unrealized ideals’; Conrad and Imperialism, p. 15. For a reading that situates Conrad’s early fiction as borrowing from and ambivalently modifying the adventure tradition, see White’s Joseph Conrad and the Adventure Tradition. 38   See Mark Conroy for a very convincing reading of Marlow’s rhetorical strategies here; Modernism and Authority: Strategies of Legitimation in Flaubert and Conrad, Baltimore, 1985, p. 114. See also Bivona who sees the Patusan episode as Marlow’s prescription of Jim’s fate into fashioning a predictable, determinate character within a reparative narrative – a strategy that absolves Marlow from the need for true self-inspection; British Imperial Literature, pp. 116–18. 39   Conrad, Collected Letters, vol. 2, p. 211. 40  In the mid-1880s Conrad had more moderate if pragmatic views: ‘I saw with pleasure the evidence of improved relations with Germany; the only power with whom an Anti-Russian alliance would be useful – and even possible – for Great Britain.’ 1886 was indeed a very brief honeymoon period in Anglo-German relations; it is also the year in which Jim comes under Stein’s influence in the novel’s chronology; Collected Letters, vol. 1, p. 12.

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beer’ (56). Marlow, who is ‘going into the yellow’, associates unspecified ‘real work’ with British colonialism while the patchiness of other powers’ possessions indicate not just the recentness and potential impermanence of these acquisitions but also a fundamental lack of moral seriousness and imperialist strategy.41 In Marlow’s version of imperialism, the Germans are less the advocates of new efficiency and ‘progress’ than self-deluded and ineffectual functionaries on an extended holiday. It is the ‘criminal inefficiency and pure selfishness’ of enterprises such as The Company and the Eldorado Exploring Expedition that Conrad wishes to attack in Heart of Darkness according to his letter to Blackwood, but what precisely constitutes ‘real work’, the very thing that justifies British colonialism, is never clarified or made concrete. Despite growing concerns over colonial malpractice, most spectacularly brought home by the abuses in the Belgian Congo, British imperialism seemed immune from such accusations precisely because it rested its credibility on the unassailable purity of intentions. These had created myths of heroism in such characters as James Brooke, General Gordon of Khartoum and Hugh Clifford that practically vouched for the means by which Empire was created, extended and secured. When Stevenson ironically commented on German mismanagement in Samoa in A Footnote to History (1892) that ‘the Germans are inspired with a sense of greatness of their affairs and interests’ on a scale that gives ‘commercial sharpness […] an air of patriotism’, he conveniently ignored the fact that the sort of ‘patriotism’ that converted commercial sharpness into greatness of purpose had also inspired British imperialists.42 Their patriotism lay enshrined in the values of English character, which at times even prevented official inquiries into malpractice.43 As Marlow dryly comments about the ineffectualness of the Patna inquiry: ‘Nothing of the sort could be disclosed’ (56). Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain’s justification of imperial hegemony with racial superiority did not sound too dissimilar to Stevenson’s critique of German colonialism: ‘I believe that the British race is the greatest of the governing races that the world has ever   Atkinson reads Heart of Darkness chiefly as a case study of ‘how badly Frenchspeaking people do imperialism’; that is a critique of colonial practice that never includes the British and therefore makes the novella suitable for publication in Maga; ‘Bound in Blackwood’s’, p. 383. 42  Stevenson, Footnote, pp. 32, 24. According to V.G. Kiernan, German colonial methods were on the whole regarded with respect by the British establishment, precisely because they were often modelled on British traditions; The Lords of Human Kind, Harmondsworth, 1972, p. 237. For the relationship between British and German colonial methods see Woodruff D. Smith, ‘Contexts of German Colonialism in Africa: British Imperialism, German Politics and the German Administrative Tradition’, in Hiery and MacKenzie, European Impact and Pacific Influence, pp. 9–23. 43   Tidrick cites James Brooke’s deployment of the British navy in the massacres of Malay ‘pirates’ as an example of how his mythical heroism protected him from legal consequences. Empire and the English Character, pp. 37–8. 41

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seen. […] It is not enough to occupy great spaces of the world’s surface unless you can make the best of them. We are landlords of a great estate; it is the duty of a landlord to develop his estate.’44 Ownership is justified by good stewardship – the British do more than merely ‘possess’, they ‘develop’ out of a sense of ‘duty’. The importance of this moral justification for racial superiority for a domestic and international audience can hardly be overestimated. Imperial rivals, however, often did not pay much heed to the rhetoric of civilizing missions, but focused on foreign acquisition as both status symbol and economic resource. The unseemly bluntness with which other industrialized nations questioned British supremacy and demanded a share in the surface of the world seemed particularly offensive to the British because it challenged a longstanding complacency. This modern challenge to ‘the spirit’ of imperialism is precisely what Jim and Marlow have to fend off in Lord Jim, and the first representative of this barbarous modernity is Gustav So-and-So. Jim’s ‘spirit’, his dreams of ‘valorous deeds’ and ‘imaginary achievements’ that are ‘the best parts of life, its secret truth, its hidden reality’ are directly contrasted with the monstrous materialism of modern global imperialism: His skipper had come up noiselessly, in pyjamas and with his sleeping-jacket flung wide open. Red of face, only half awake, the left eye partly closed, the right staring stupid and glassy, he hung his head over the chart and scratched his ribs sleepily. There was something obscene in the sight of his naked flesh. His bared breast glistened soft and greasy as though he had sweated out his fat in his sleep. […] the fold of his double chin hung like a bag triced up close under the hinge of his jaw. Jim started, and his answer was full of deference; but the odious and fleshly figure, as though seen for the first time in a revealing moment, fixed itself in his memory forever as the incarnation of everything vile and base that lurks in the world we love; in our hearts we trust for our salvation in the men that surround us, in the sights that fill our eye, in the sounds that fill our ears, and in the air that fills our lungs. (20­–2­1)

Jim is startled because this German monstrosity represents the first jolt out of the ‘hidden reality’ of his heroic fantasies into a more vulgar truth.45 Yet early on there is an indication that Jim’s trust in ‘hidden truths’ is a terrible misjudgement of his own flaws and of modern times, in which everything has been reduced to its commercial value. It is a short step from the cynical narrator’s designation of the Patna’s Arab pilgrims as ‘human cargo’ (16) to the captain and the second engineer’s blatant racism which dehumanizes them to ‘cattle’ and ‘vermin’ (15, 44

  Chamberlain in a speech in March 1895 to the Birmingham Jewellers’ Association. Cited in J.L. Garvin, The Life of Joseph Chamberlain, London, 1932–34, vol. 3, p. 19. 45   For Weinstein, the skipper’s physiognomy stands in direct contrast to Jim’s heroic dreams – a contrast between gross physicality and naive idealism; Semantics of Desire, p. 165.

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25). In the passage above, the obscene manifestation of modern imperialism is clear before Jim’s eyes but this bloated bulk is quickly dematerialized from excessive visibility to the symbolic latency of incarnations: it ‘lurks’.46 As a result of this reductive logic, subjective reality can be trusted, external reality even ignored, against all evidence to the contrary: ‘Nothing can touch me’ (413). Modern imperialism made for a crowded marketplace in which the Germans became offensively conspicuous. In ‘The End of the Tether’ Conrad illustrated the consequences of the transition from the centuries-old tradition of sailing to the modern industrialized age of steamships (a shift that affected the job opportunities of his own career at sea).47 There are echoes here of Gustav So-and-So, who thinks that ‘the Pacific is big’: ‘The earth is big,’ said [Captain Whalley]. […] ‘Doesn’t seem to be so much room on it,’ growled the Master-Attendant, ‘since these Germans came along shouldering us at every turn. It was not so in our time.’ (188)

The Germans are the new force of relentless modernity, accelerating the demise of venerable but outdated crafts and individuals (and by implication, outdated heroic ideals). They make an already cramped marketplace even tighter: by-and-by a squad of confounded German tramps turned up east of Suez Canal and swept up all the crumbs. They prowled on the cheap to and fro along the coast and between the islands, like a lot of sharks in the water ready to snap up anything you let drop. And then the high old times were over for good. (185)

The animal simile in this passage has the same effect as the obesity metaphor for the German skipper: it symbolizes the rapaciousness of the new German Empire that battled for profit and territory in formerly British zones in Africa and in the East.48 ‘The German eagle with a Prussian head looks all round the horizon not 46   It also more than ‘lurks’ in the rest of the novel’s impressive array of grotesquely outsized characters: Captain Montague Brierley is ‘Big Brierley’, not least for the size of his unfaltering self-regard; the French lieutenant has ‘a massive body’ (148); the plaintive in the assault case is ‘obese’; Doramin, who will shoot Jim in retaliation for losing his son Dain Waris, is described as ‘not […] merely fat’ but ‘imposing, monumental’ (259); a half-caste lowly Dutch government official who perpetuates myths about Jim in Patusan is equally ‘big, fat’ and ‘greasy’ (278); Stein’s former agent in Patusan, the half-Portuguese Cornelius, is also of excessive girth. 47  See John Stape, The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad, London, 2007, p. 46. 48   For good studies of this background of imperial rivalry alongside Kennedy’s magisterial tome The Rise of Anglo-German Antagonism, see John Lowe, The Great Powers, Imperialism and the German Problem, 1865–­1925, London, 1994, Chs 4, 5; Blackbourn, History of Germany, Ch. 9; Mommsen, Imperial Germany, pp. 75–97.

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so much for something to do that would count for good in the records of the earth, as simply for something good to get’, Conrad argued in ‘Autocracy and War’ (1905), denouncing the lack of any justification that might wrap up a blunter intention with the secondary notion of a civilizing mission.49 In Nostromo (1904) German influence and money are so established that the major trade language of the South American republic of Costaguana is German.50 Like many of his British conservative peers, Conrad diagnosed ‘German influence’ as one of the catalysts for conflict endangering the British Empire at the turn of the twentieth century.51 In a letter to his Polish relative Aniela Zagórska at the time of the Boer War, Conrad defended England’s imperial mission through the concept of national character: My feelings are very complex […] That [the Boers] are struggling in good faith for their independence cannot be doubted; but it is also a fact that they have no idea of liberty, which can only be found under the English flag all over the world. C’est un people essentiellement despotique, like by the way all the Dutch. This war is not so much a war against the Transvaal as a struggle against the doings of German influence. It is the Germans who have forced the issue. There can be no doubt about it. […] here in England there is more real sympathy and regard for the Boers than on the whole Continent, which proclaims its compassion at the top of its voice.52

49

  Conrad, ‘Autocracy and War’, p. 113.   For David Blackbourn, German informal imperialism in South America was a textbook example of ‘economic penetration without political annexation’; History of Germany, p. 335. German financial prowess in particular turned out to be a thorny issue in Conrad’s life. In his early years in Marseille, Richard Fecht, a German, had lent him money, which he lost in Monte Carlo. A German-born Amercian, Adolph Krieger, helped Conrad to a partnership in a Stuttgart-based German ships agent, Barr, Moering & Co., in whose London warehouse Conrad briefly worked when his means were depleted. Krieger also assisted his admission to the German hospital in London when Conrad returned from his Congo journey in 1891, racked by fever and dysentery. Conrad’s hard-earned fees for the serial publication of his writing and the many advances he begged of his editor William Blackwood frequently went straight into Krieger’s wallet when he called in Conrad’s substantial debts. (See, for instance, Conrad, Collected Letters, vol. 2, p. 163.) Eventually this led to their estrangement after a 15-year friendship; see Stape, Several Lives, pp. 32, 45, 67. The character Schomberg, who becomes more malicious and more stereotypically Teutonic over his fictional lifetime, is modelled on a German broker in Singapore, Karl Schomburgk. See Sherry, Conrad’s Eastern World, pp. 239–45. 51  See also Brian Spittles, Joseph Conrad, Houndmills, 1992, pp. 74–5, 104–109. 52   Conrad, Collected Letters, vol. 2, p. 230. In a letter to William Blackwood two days later, Conrad did censure the English press for unseemly jubilation (ibid., p. 231), and indeed his collaboration with Ford Madox Hueffer, The Inheritors, is a response to some of the bigotry of the Boer War. 50

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34

Complex feelings indeed. As a Polish émigré writer and naturalized British subject, Conrad’s sympathy for an independence movement is nonetheless tempered by his loyalty to the British Empire. Presumably critical of Dutch imperialism, he denies the ‘despotic’ Boers any concept of ‘liberty’ as if it were a quality deeply embedded in English national character and history. As recent critics have shown, Conrad’s Polish background made for a problematic attitude towards other nations and a nationalism which was out of step with the democratic developments of the modern age and rather oblivious to his own class’s traditional implication in power politics.53 His definition of Polishness also depended heavily on those others he repeatedly denounced as inimical to ‘the spirit’ of Poland – Germany and Russia.54 Against the confounding forces of modernity that supersede heroic ideals, national character fortifies and anchors us metaphysically – as long as it is the English character: All passes, all changes: the animosity of peoples, the handling of fleets, the forms of ships; and even the sea itself seems to wear a different and diminished aspect for the sea of Lord Nelson’s day. […] we must turn to the national spirit, which, superior in force and continuity to good and evil fortune, can alone give us the feeling of an enduring existence and of an invincible power against the fates’.55

There is a nostalgic hope that the heroic ideal of the glory days of Empire still infuses today’s ‘superior’ ‘national spirit’. The latter is firmly tethered to the institutions of the British Empire, notably the Merchant Navy whose ‘spirit of service’ takes concrete form in the stewardship of their ship, ‘the moral symbol of [their] life’.56 Patusan is Jim’s romantic replacement of the Patna, his second chance of adhering to ‘the spirit of service’ that exchanges the material ship for the material colony. The ‘national spirit’ is also invoked in the novel as the more straightforward notion of a geographical and cultural ‘home’. ‘Home’ is important in Lord Jim, not merely because Jim can never return to it, but also because Marlow the wanderer needs to get the tale ‘home’ (337) to the Privileged Reader  See for instance Avrom Fleishman, Conrad’s Politics: Community and Anarchy in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad, Baltimore, 1967, pp. 5ff.; Geoffrey Harpham, One of Us: Mastery of Joseph Conrad, Chicago, 1997, pp. 1–13; Parry, Conrad and Imperialism, pp. 13–14. 54   In ‘Autocracy and War’ he adopts Bismarck’s verdict on Russia as a Nothing (‘Néant’; 100) but closes with Prussia as the new ‘l’ennemi’ (114). See Fleishman, Conrad’s Politics, pp. 53–63, on the dependence of the Polish independence movements on German organicist thought, and Harpham, One of Us, pp. 19ff., on the anachronisms of Polish nationalism. 55   Joseph Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea, London, 1924, p. 194. 56   Joseph Conrad, ‘Well Done’, Notes on Life and Letters, pp. 188–91. 53

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in the Christian city as he did in Heart of Darkness. ‘Going home’, according to Marlow, ‘must be like going to render an account’: [We] have to meet the spirit that dwells within the land, under its sky, in its air, in its valleys, and on its rises, in its fields, in its waters and its trees – a mute friend, judge, and inspirer. […] We all feel it though, and I say all without exception, because those who do not feel do not count. Each blade of grass has its spot on earth whence it draws its life, its strength; and so is man rooted to the land from which he draws his faith together with his life. (221ff.)

The community described here is a patriotic one, literally rooted in native soil and infused with ‘the spirit’ of the land which presumably also fortifies against transculturation abroad and inspires ‘the spirit of service’ in imperial institutions. Conrad of course also writes for this home audience, of whom the Privileged Reader is presumably a representative who dismisses any egalitarian intentions underpinning the white man’s burden as an ‘illusory satisfaction [and] unavoidable deception’ and asserts that the civilizing mission is only ‘endurable and enduring when based on a firm conviction of the truth of ideas racially our own, in whose name are established the order, the morality of an ethical progress. […] We want a belief in its necessity and its justice, to make a worthy and conscious sacrifice of our lives’ (339). There are echoes here of the novel’s epigraph and of the legitimizing ‘idea’ in Heart of Darkness, notably in the verifying effect of sharing a conviction. Yet the venerable notion of ‘ethical progress’ (as opposed to the modernity of High Capitalism) enabled by national character (‘ideas racially our own’) is peculiarly phrased. It comes across as rather tired ideological scaffolding for the imperial project, about whose meaning and efficacy both the Privileged Reader and Marlow in his lame response (‘Possibly!’) betray a considerable measure of doubt. One wonders if these solemnly spoken platitudes are not really an assuaging address to the privileged readers of Blackwood’s Magazine to which Conrad felt a strong loyalty. He wrote to his editor William Blackwood, ‘When I sit down to write for you I feel as if in a friendly atmosphere, untrammelled – like one is with people that understand, of whom one is perfectly sure.’57 And later to a rival publisher: ‘Blackwood’s is the only periodical always open to me – and is the only one for which I really care to work.’58 Blackwood’s was ‘home’. The ‘national spirit’ as a transportable phenomenon of cultural specificity materializes in ‘Falk’ in the characterization of a German family aboard a trawler in the Straits of Singapore. The Hermanns are remarkable creations of national character for the way in which they are hyperbolically tethered to their homeland, with the father ‘resembl[ing] curiously a caricature of a shopkeeping citizen in one

  Conrad, Collected Letters, vol. 2, p. 162.  Ibid., p. 182.

57 58

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of his own German comic papers’.59 The Diana’s cuddy resembles a farm kitchen, and the cabin ‘a rustic cottage in the country’ complete with clothes line, curtains, flower pots and knitting maidens (79). The conjugal demeanour of the couple at the wheel of the barque in the frame narrative is also immediately identified as German, and this parallel sets the tale in motion, as if the capacity for domesticity were a peculiar hallmark of Germanness, like militarism, subordination or efficiency. These Germans, it seems, don’t adapt or assimilate. Unlike Gustav So-and-So, the Hermanns are unlikely to disappear suddenly nor do they blend into the hybrid colonial East. Their appearance of domesticity, however, shrouds a more disquieting trait: The afternoon breeze would incite to a weird and flabby activity all that crowded mass of clothing, with its vague suggestions of drowned, mutilated and flattened humanity. Trunks without heads waved at you arms without hands; legs without feet kicked fantastically with collapsible flourishes; and there were long white garments, that taking the wind fairly through their neck openings edged with lace, became for a moment violently distended as by the passage of obese and invisible bodies. On these days you could make out that ship at a great distance by the multi-coloured grotesque riot going on abaft her mizzen-mast. (79–80)

Rarely has a load of washing been described as such a paradoxical, quasi-gothic spectacle. These are sinister, invisible, spectral bodies inflated into mutilated shapes, and they mark an excessive Teutonic presence through obesity and visibility that we have encountered before in Lord Jim. In fact, the grotesqueness of the spectacle aptly describes how Conrad harnesses the uncanny, disquieting notion of a German presence to a humorous, parodic gesture. And this passage anticipates the more sinister motif of Falk’s cannibalism that dismembers human shapes into collapsible, edible parts. The marriage of the Hermanns’ silent, superfluous niece to the large Scandinavian with his terrible secret clearly suggests a temperamental affinity that is also expressed through both invisible and excessively visible corporeality. Subject to ‘racial sentimentalism’ (the term is used three times), the Hermanns turn out to be manipulative, hypocritical and self-satisfied in their petit bourgeois domesticity. They economize by marrying off the surplus woman for the sake of saving the cost of an additional cabin on the passage home. Yet their venality is amply matched by the narrator’s desire for the niece, which clothes his enthrallment in almost purely economic terms: she is made with a ‘reckless expenditure of material’, ‘built on a magnificent scale’ with ‘regal lavishness’ and 59   Joseph Conrad, ‘Falk: A Reminscence’, in Typhoon and other Tales, ed. Cedric Watts, Oxford, 2002, p. 103. All subsequent references to this edition are cited parenthetically in the text. In a letter to his agent, Conrad emphasizes that the Hermanns are the main subject of this tale (‘the people I wanted to do; the story of Falk being more or less a foil to the main purpose’), rather than the more melodramatic topic of cannibalism, which made it so difficult to place the story with a publisher; Conrad, Collected Letters, vol. 2, p. 441.

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‘imposing charm’ (81) – more ship than woman. Somewhere between a charitable giantess and an edible statue, her strange beauty is a variation on Gustav’s corporeal excess: rather than greed, she represents an aesthetic abundance that invites an erotic response. The implication is, of course that such a generous form will be wellmatched in Falk’s transgressive intensity of desire (for cannibalism read carnality) while the English narrator remains visually overwhelmed and sexually paralysed by the niece’s ample body. ‘Falk’ is primarily a story about human exchange value (rather than sacrifice or charity) in an international market in which the niece seizes agency by deciding with whom to trade – the Nordic monopolist, the thrifty German shopkeeper or the impotent English narrator.60 It is of course also a story that insists on the essential strangeness of foreigners on the imperial scene that provoke in the Englishman anxieties similar to those experienced in the encounter with exotic ‘natives’. And yet, the superior civilization that the Englishman represents over natives and imperial rivals depends on the suppression of powerful instincts – ‘grotesque riot[s]’ of impulses – that he shares with them.61 Ostentatious and excessive materiality of ‘national spirit’ that is nonetheless also lacking in something (humanity, body parts, voice) is Conrad’s metaphor for Stevenson’s patriotism of sharp commerce. National spirit also infuses linguistic and organizational peculiarities, as in the comparison between German and English terms for marine ranks: [Hermann] was a Schiff-führer: Ship-conductor. That’s how they call a Master Mariner in Germany. I prefer our way. The alliteration is good, and there is something in the nomenclature that gives to us as a body the sense of corporate existence: Apprentice, Mate, Master, in the ancient and honourable craft of the sea. (78–9)

Apprentice, journeyman, master are the stages of vocational training that since the Middle Ages and to this day regulate trades and crafts in Germany and ensure national qualifications and professional standards through a guild system. There 60

  Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan’s Lacanian reading of ‘Falk’ as a story about subjectivity takes a more charitable view of the narrator. For her, his is a story of initiation into the symbolic order at the end of which he has won ‘a hard-earned place within a community of action and discourse’, that is the corporate body of seafaring men in the frame narrative that we find in so many of Conrad’s narratives. The Strange Fiction of Joseph Conrad; Writing, Culture and Subjectivity, Oxford, 1999, p. 108. Conrad’s ‘Author’s Note’ to the story emphasizes that ‘Falk’ is not about cannibalism but ‘the effects [of that knowledge] upon the persons in the tale’. Cannibalism is ‘not the subject of the tale’ but ‘the subject is Falk’s attempt to get married’ (219–20). No doubt this is belated prurience and anxiousness on Conrad’s part about the audience’s reaction to the insalubrious topic, but it does capture the core socioeconomic transaction around which the plot critically revolves. 61   Freud would make this point more generally in terms of his ‘libidinal economy’ in Civilization and its Discontents (1930).

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were only a few international equivalents to this system of vocational training; seafaring was one of them, but on the whole Germany was considered rather advanced in the way in which it had professionalized vocational skills.62 Conductor – or, more precisely, leader – emphasizes the individual’s authority while Master also underlines the skills that entitle him to this authority. In Conrad’s later fiction, Germans mutate into Teutons, notably Schomberg, who appears briefly in Lord Jim, crucially feeds the gossip mill in ‘Falk’ and, losing his Alsatian hybridity in Victory (1915), deteriorates into such a malicious figure that Conrad feels obliged, in his author’s note, to justify this character’s ‘deeper passions’ and his ‘grotesque psychology’: ‘I don’t pretend to say that this is the entire Teutonic psychology, but it is indubitably the psychology of a Teuton. […] far from being the incarnation of recent animosities, he is the creature of my old, deep-seated and, as it were, impartial convictions’ – less grotesque physique than grotesque psychology.63 ‘Schomberg was a good hater,’ the narrator summarizes.64 Not a product of antebellum Germanophobia or indeed propaganda, then, this Teuton represents the finesse of Conrad’s ‘impartial convictions’, which coincided with the racial analysis of the comic papers in 1915 with tedious frequency. Worse than the materialized and materialistic ‘national spirit’, however, is its dissipation or loss in transculturated identities, hybridity or deracination. As Geoffrey Harpham has argued, many of Conrad’s protagonists and narrators are cut loose from geopolitical or sociopolitical entities or become agents of an undoing of national cohesiveness.65 Lord Jim is replete with at least a dozen nationalities, Asian and European, and many ‘half-breeds’ and ‘half-castes’ among them that are the product of colonial miscegenation.66 Gentleman Brown cynically points to Jim’s unstable identity underneath his romanticized stewardship in Patusan: ‘You have been white once, for all your talk of this being your own people’ (381). This is an era in which new imperialism, international trade and modern transport have made national (and by implication ethnic or racial) identity much more fluid and equivocal. Paradoxically, it is again the German skipper who stands for this confounded modern indeterminacy. Nothing but his material excess is definite: his origins are unclear (Flensborg in Schleswig-Holstein or Stettin in Pomerania?); in his political opportunism he publicly denounces his country but 62  See Searle, Quest for National Efficiency; Harold Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880, London, 1989. 63   Joseph Conrad, Victory, ed. Cedric Watts, London, 1994, p. 3–4. 64  Ibid., p. 26. 65  Harpham, One of Us, pp. 42–3. 66   Conrad’s attitudes to hybridity throughout his writing seem to reflect similarly contradictory and inconsistent opinions to those we find in nineteenth-century evolutionary thinking, from polygenist dead-ends to Darwinist degeneration to the raceless chaos of unrestrained miscegenation popularized by Gobineau. For contradictions of nineteenthcentury race theory see Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race, London, 2003, Chs 1, 4.

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wears a Bismarckian ‘“blood-and-iron” air’ (14) – a demeanour indicative of the ‘logical duplicity’ Conrad habitually found in the foreign policy of Wilhelmine Germany.67 Most damning, however, is his ‘renegade’ status that enables him simply to vanish from the narrative, having first affiliated himself to New South Wales before he solves the dilemma of losing his certificate with another change of nationality: ‘I vill an American citizen become’ (42). This is no flattering comment about the United States. As one of the new Imperial Powers jostling with Spain and Britain in the Philippines and the Pacific, this immigrant nation would easily accommodate someone of Gustav’s temperament.68 There is a sense that his wilful deracination symbolizes colonial action cut loose from the ‘national spirit’; because Gustav does not ‘feel’ any loyalty to any nation, he does not ‘count’. Sentimental Hermann and even Romantic Stein are at least metonymically readable; they also either return home or bequeath their conquest as national treasure. For Conrad, Germans represent a lower plane of modern imperialism, its reduction from ‘the spirit’ of racially inspired ethical progress to stateless, offensive materiality and blunter materialism. Projected onto the memorably hyperbolical Gustav as if in a primary process of condensation and displacement, Conrad’s critique widens in the course of the narrative to include the concessions made by ostensibly impeccable seamen such as Marlow and Brierley, before we encounter Masterman’s ‘ancestry of criminals and adventurers’ in Chester and Brown. Because modern imperialism is so woefully devoid of the national spirit, it requires the English hero and a return to the heroic ideals of an earlier age of imperialism that will lend meaning to its legitimizing fictions. Yet this anachronistic national hero is also symptomatic of the Empire’s ideological unravelling in the face of the challenges of modernity. The dynamics of hybridity and denationalization concomitant with imperialism and global capitalism become a much more unsettling cultural factor in the antebellum decade, when they begin to infiltrate the domestic metropolis. In The Secret Agent (1907), the fluidity of national identity and its performative nature manifests itself in anarchism, espionage and international terrorism. For E.M. Forster, however, it is German immigration and German culture that challenge the ideology of national character and its imperialist ethos.

67

 See Conrad, ‘Autocracy and War’, p. 95.   ‘If one could set the States & Germany by the ears! That would be real fine,’ Conrad writes on the occasion of the Spanish-American war; Conrad, Collected Letters, vol. 2, p. 81. 68

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Chapter 2

Forster’s Accessible Foreignness Prussian Junkers versus ‘German Cosmopolitans’ Before the great hiatus of the First World War Edwardian culture indulged in the luxury of entertaining two mutually conflicting attitudes towards foreigners and things foreign. On the one hand, they were signifiers of the exotic and of the international artistic avant-garde, and therefore of an attractive otherness which was often commercially marketable and consumable: international exhibitions, foreign art forms such as the Ballets Russes, orientalism, even foreign cuisine. Yet in order to be ‘acceptable’, foreignness and its commercially viable representations had to steer clear of specific un-English features to avoid being risible or ‘degenerate’. In 1913 Punch published a cartoon that underlined how temperamentally different the English thought they were from the rest of the world. ‘Hints to foreigners who produce cinema films for the English market’ (Fig. 2.1) suggests that English culture was not receptive to foreign ‘excesses’ of violence, emotion and attire, and therefore representations of the foreign should be tempered with restraint irrespective of home-grown scandalous divorce cases, peculiar hunting fashions and British militarism. (Little attention is paid here to the hyperbolic semiotics characteristic of silent film.) Significations of otherness were only tolerable and marketable when they did not challenge the supremacy of Englishness or indeed did not make visible the historical heterogeneity of Englishness (and Britishness) as a result of successive waves of immigration and assimilation. Then as now foreigners were often ‘the victims of [a] modernity’ that only promises a pluralist existence as long as it remains within a still fundamentally national framework.



 This was precisely the issue that led to the Aliens Act in 1905, a law largely directed against Jewish immigrants who became conspicuous as ethnic communities in large metropolitan centres like London, Liverpool and Manchester. See Bryan Cheyette, Constructions of ‘the Jew’ in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875–1945, Cambridge, 1993, Ch. 5.    Carol A. Breckenridge et al., Introduction, Cosmopolitanism, Durham, 2002, p. 6.

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Figure 2.1

Hints to Foreigners, Punch (1913)

Forster’s Accessible Foreignness

43

If – as Marcel Mauss was to argue in the 1930s – national identity was a matter of performance, habitus or technique, the unquestioned superiority of the English expressed itself in a ‘naturalness’ of understatement, in a lack of signification. ‘Naturalization’, then, literally meant an official recognition of reduced signification; an effort that according to Punch would not come naturally to most foreigners. On the other hand, then, foreignness stood for racial and cultural inferiority, a threat to national security, hygiene and identity, and caused considerable concern about immigration, military invasion, alien infiltration, espionage and anarchism. This anxious notion of the foreign also took note of migrations from the colonies and overseas and visible clusters of ethnic groups in urban centres. Both attitudes towards the foreign appeared to rest on assumptions about clearly definable boundaries between the ‘national’ and the ‘other’ which made each category identifiable, and their transgression visible. At the same time these attitudes at least implied political, economic or cultural gestures that had invited foreign elements onto native shores and made Britain attractive to the foreign other. It was the presence of the foreign within the nation that gave rise to concern or excitement and that suggested that boundaries had already been breached, dissolved or indeed never existed in the first place. It may be no coincidence therefore that this climate of ambivalence about the strange and the familiar generated classic Edwardian studies of ‘Englishness’, from Ford Madox Ford’s essay triptych England and the English (1905–7) to C.F.G. Masterman’s The Condition of England (1909) to E.M. Forster’s novel Howards End (1910). This chapter deals with literary and cultural discourses that stage a range of positions towards the Germans within a broader debate about ‘foreignness’. Of all the possible national or ethnic alterities, the Germans still represented an accessible foreignness; not exotically colonial, not radically other, but still recognizably different. Their place within the spectrum of foreignness has to be seen in the context of an often anxious Edwardian debate about national identity in an age of growing internationalism that negotiates traditional ‘Englishness’ versus modern ‘cosmopolitanism’. For a brief period before the First World War, the Germans served as a short-lived example of how nineteenth-century notions of racial hybridity might evolve into early twentieth-century ideas of cultural hybridity. The classic articulation of this potential transition is Howards End, although it is not the only Edwardian Anglo-German romance. Elizabeth von Arnim’s bestselling pre-war novels about Germans and Germany serve as a useful foil to Forster’s vision, feeding Edwardian interest in national character and introducing her audience to the Teutonic sub-species of the Prussian Junker. Von Arnim’s  See Marcel Mauss, ‘Techniques of the Body’, trans. Ben Brewster, in Techniques, Technology and Civilization, ed. Nathan Schlanger, New York, 2006, pp. 77–95.   It is perhaps no coincidence that writers who became naturalized British citizens – Joseph Conrad, Henry James, albeit for very different reasons – adopted a style that overtly demonstrated their mastery of (British) English language and culture while at the same time producing an often highly opaque idiom. 

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work also enables us to examine an important distinction in the representation of accessible foreignness: the Germans being perceived as foreign in England and the English experiencing themselves as foreign when in Germany. In Howards End Forster examines the impact of Germans in England through the issues of cosmopolitanism, assimilation and transculturation that all complicate any simple notion of Englishness based on the binary opposition between self and other. The central question in Howards End is: who will inherit the titular farmhouse that symbolizes an idealized, nostalgic narrative of continuity with a mythical Anglo-Saxon past – the vulgar Wilcox family, owners of the Imperial West African Rubber Company, into whose hands it had originally fallen through marriage, or the Schlegels, who as Anglo-German second-generation immigrants represent everything that is anathema to the imperialist Wilcoxes: culture, intellect, feminine emotional excess and imperial rivalry? Both families represent different types of modernity: the Schlegels are adherents of an international cultural avantgarde; the Wilcoxes stand for utilitarian and commercially viable technological progress. While Forster is certainly more sympathetic towards the cultured Schlegels, he is also deeply nostalgic for a mythical age of pastoral Englishness – a nostalgia symptomatic of the Edwardian era’s ambivalent attitude to modernity. Forster’s concern with mythical localized identities is constantly negotiated against the national ramifications of imperialism but also against a largely international modernity as we find it in the cosmopolitan metropolis. Forster’s novel and Ford’s essays on Englishness are surprisingly optimistic books that articulate important counter-arguments to the simplistic nationalisms of the antebellum decade. They do not so much outline Ford’s and Forster’s positions in the Edwardian discourse about national identity as demonstrate an engagement with this discourse, dramatizing a range of possible positions. Forster’s ambivalence pitches his scepticism towards cosmopolitanism against his recognition of desirable hybridity and ‘hyphenated’ identities that argue for international coexistence. Ford concludes in his trilogy of essays that ‘the spirit’ of the people is less a distilled national essence than a cocktail of assimilated ingredients in infinite dilution. Both writers ultimately

   Howards End has traditionally been read as a fictional response to the Edwardian liberal crisis. Forster’s focus on the middle classes and his quasi-Georgian pastoral retrenchment against the motor car and urban sprawl have made for near-canonical critical readings of Howards End as retrograde, socially limited and nostalgic. See, for instance, Peter Widdowson, E.M. Forster’s Howards End: Fiction as History, London, 1977, and also Patrick Parrinder’s Nation and Novel, Oxford, 2006, p. 292.   Recent readings of Howards End have credited Forster with a much more differentiated argument about modernity, commercialized nostalgia and the modern heritage movement. See, for instance, Daniel Born, ‘Private Gardens, Public Swamps: Howards End and the Revaluation of Liberal Guilt’, Novel, 25 (1992): 141–59. Elizabeth Outka, ‘Buying Time: Howards End and Commodified Nostalgia’, Novel, 36/3 (2003): 330–50. Both also revaluated the novel’s pervasive engagement with liberal guilt and financial anxiety.

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realize that notions of an essentialist national identity must give way to an unstable performativity encouraged by the modern metropolis and imperialist legacies. ‘The German Strain’: Empire and National Character Ford Madox Ford (then still Ford Hermann Hueffer) saw in British imperialism an assimilative trait that hinted at the hybrid national character of the ‘AngloSaxons’, a term maybe more in keeping with the spirit of his work than the more homogenous-sounding England and the English. At a time of intense AngloGerman political and economic rivalry, Ford commented in The Spirit of the People on the way in which England had for a long time been receptive to German influence (which for Conrad, we recall, was intrusive and morally illegitimate). Ford, too, saw contemporary German influence and presence as a manifestation of modernity, the latest development of Protestant ‘Germanic forces of the nation’, emergent since the days of Cromwell– an argument possibly indebted to Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–5). This modernity was not foreign but integral to Ford’s hybrid notion of Englishness. He pointed out that Britain, too, was striving to become part ‘of the whole modern, Germanized world’ (273) by aiming for qualities conventionally denounced as Prussian. He explicitly cited British campaigns for national efficiency and universal conscription as evidence: ‘the whole country was crying out for the Prussianization of our schools, our armies, our laboratories, because “we are a nation of amateurs”’ (259). The opposition of amateurishness, a key feature of traditional Englishness, to modern, rationalized Germanization is particularly noteworthy. Ford identified a key common denominator in both national characters. At a time of rampant militarism, he argued that ‘the English and the German are akin in their respect for authority’ (243). Industrial ‘warfare’ rested on a similar affinity: ‘If eventually – and no doubt we shall – we beat the Germans in the great war of [chemical] byproducts, it will probably be because of the German strain that is in us already’ (268). If that German strain was already part of the fabric of Englishness and of modernity, it might merely be a question of assimilating it most advantageously in the tradition of previous foreign incorporations.   Ford originally contemplated publishing his trilogy under the title The Anglo-Saxons for his American publishers McClure, Phillips and Co. (New York 1907). See letter to James B. Pinker [August 1906]; Letters of Ford Madox Ford, ed. Richard M. Ludwig, Princeton, 1965, p. 24.    Ford Madox Ford, England and the English, ed. Sara Haslam, Manchester, 2003, p. 271. All subsequent references to this edition are cited parenthetically in the text.    For the strategy to beat Germany by adapting her own methods, vocational training and institutions, see Gregory Anderson, ‘German Clerks in England, 1870–1914’, in Kenneth Lunn (ed.), Hosts, Immigrants and Minorities, Folkestone, 1980, pp. 201–22 at p. 203; and Searle, Quest for National Efficiency, pp. 54ff. 

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English Modernism, National Identity and the Germans, 1890–1950 If indeed it be true that the enemy is Prussianism – that the world is gradually coming to a state of mind in which it shall be most important to a nation to produce the more essentially Germanic type, we may well hope to produce the man. We may well hope, in fact, to muddle through. We have, in the composition of our complex republic, Germans enough to select from. And it must be reaffirmed that the Germans who have come to England, like the Scots, the Danes, the French, the Poles, the Huguenots or the Doukhobors, are precisely the bad eggs, the adventurous, the restless, the energetic of their several nations. And these adventurers, these restless, these energetic units are, precisely too, the best breeders for a fighting race. […] so England may well hope to produce a man fitted to contend, in the end with the kaiser or professor who is to set the tune for the next generation. (277–8)

Both nations are modern: the Germans because they happen to embody the spirit of the age, perhaps with a Nietzschean superman or a Carlylesque hero, and the English have always been modern because of their assimilative character, allowing foreign elements to flourish on their soil and enrich the host with the best qualities of the emigrant: ‘bad eggs’ and restless adventurers thus become ‘the eternal frontiersmen of the world’ (260). This is indeed ‘a frontal assault on the conception of national character as a stable and unchanging inheritance’, as Patrick Parrinder has argued.10 As we shall see, the eternal frontiersmen in Ford and Forster have to acknowledge that they are also a powerful force of internationalism, if not cosmopolitanism, while claiming to safeguard nationalist prerogatives on a global political map. Masterman’s The Condition of England was highly influenced by Ford’s writing on national character. As we have seen in Chapter 1, Masterman’s critique of British imperialism identified the empire as less an outlet for assimilative powers than an expression of expansionism as geographically opportune social selection. It is the English middle classes and their ‘elemental unrest […] as an inheritance from an ancestry of criminals and adventurers’ that ventures forth, not Kipling’s ‘best’: no foreign ‘bad eggs’ here.11 If the English come across to the foreign observer as endowed with ‘a serene confidence in the justice of their supremacy’, as ‘a conquering race, secure, imperturbable, profoundly careless of opinion outside’, this merely demonstrates ‘strong national discipline’: ‘today the English are the only people who have truly national manners and characteristics’. Compared to the intelligent and cultured French and the scientific and laborious Germans they may be ‘barbarians’ but their national character now exercises a global authority.12 10   Patrick Parrinder, ‘“All That is Solid Melts into Air”: Ford and the Spirit of Edwardian England’, in Joseph Wiesenfarth (ed.), History and Representation in Ford Madox Ford’s Writings, Amsterdam, 2004, pp. 5–19, at p. 7. 11   Masterman, Condition of England, p. 15. 12  Ibid., pp. 48–9.

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Yet global authority comes at a price. Masterman diagnoses a form of national exhaustion as a result of imperial success. His lament about degeneration and inefficiency echoes the contemporary awareness of failing national competitiveness, ‘a deflection of vigour and intellectual energy to irrelevant standards and pleasures’.13 In his socioeconomic critique Imperialism (1902) J.A. Hobson had argued that capitalism resulted in the proportionate decline of imagination and creative activity in increasingly materialist cultures: an individual may expend all his energies in acquiring external possessions, adding field to field, barn to barn, factory to factory – may ‘spread himself’ over the widest area of property, amassing material wealth which is in some sense ‘himself’ […] He does this by specialising upon the lower acquisitive plane of interest at the cost of neglecting the cultivation of higher qualities […] of his nature.14

Imperialists are destined to become barbarians rather than Chamberlain’s stewards or exporters of civilization because the very act of expansion precludes civilized or civilizing activities. Forster, too, asks about the emotional and cultural cost of expansionism and the hypocrisies of imperial rivalry by staging an Anglo-German encounter in Howards End. The way in which Forster characterizes the Schlegel family and their German heritage traces the history of Anglo-German relations from the more amicable mid-nineteenth century to the tense antebellum years. Father Schlegel stands for the pre-Bismarckian Germany associated with music, philosophy and philology; the Germany much loved by Carlyle, Thackeray and George Eliot. Schlegel, however, is also a member of a fighting race, a veteran of the German wars of unification and the Franco-Prussian war. It is a clever response to the British critique of German expansionism that Forster chooses a character who is both an academic and a soldier, both German and anglophile, in order to articulate a Hobsonesque critique of the imperialist misuse of the epistemological quest. For Schlegel, ‘some quality had vanished for which not all Alsace-Lorraine could compensate him’.15 When humanism and idealism – ‘the cultivation of higher qualities’ – give way to the more aggressive new nation state, Schlegel decides to emigrate: Germany a commercial power, Germany a naval power, Germany with colonies here and a Forward Policy there, and legitimate aspirations in the other place, might appeal to others, and be fitly served by them; for his own part, he abstained from the fruits of victory, and naturalised himself in England. (42)

13

 Ibid., p. 51.   J.A. Hobson, Imperialism, London, 1988, p. 91. 15   E.M. Forster, Howards End, ed. Oliver Stallybrass, Harmondsworth, 1992, p. 42. All subsequent references to this edition are cited parenthetically in the text. 14

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It is of course one of Forster’s ironies that Father Schlegel should choose a country that had enjoyed the fruits of similar victories for many centuries to the extent of ‘naturalizing’ them into ‘Englishness’. One might justifiably ask what naturalization really means if the condition for emigration is difference but that for assimilation, similarity? This indeed is the blind spot around which Forster’s plot revolves: the denial of cultural affinity and political similarity; the inability to ‘connect’ one’s own situation with that of another. Hobson found that this ‘genius of inconsistency, of holding conflicting ideas or feelings in the mind simultaneously, in watertight compartments, is perhaps peculiarly British’.16 The imperialist needs this unconscious psychology to justify his strategies and avoid self-criticism, indeed to project the problematics of one’s own strategies onto the competitors. That the Germans were adapting British strategies to further their own economic and political interests became a literary topos of the pre-war years in spy fiction, but was rarely as clearly articulated as in Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands (1909): ‘We can’t talk about conquest and grabbing. We’ve collared a fine share of the world, and they’ve every right to be jealous’.17 Forster’s Hobsonian critique of imperialism dismisses expansionism as being on a lower plane. Here is the now anglicized Herr Schlegel arguing with a haughty German nephew: Your Pan-Germanism is no more imaginative than is our Imperialism over here. It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness, to think that a thousand square miles are a thousand times more wonderful than one square mile, and that a million square miles are almost the same as heaven. That is not imagination. No, it kills it. When their poets over here try to celebrate bigness they are dead at once, and naturally. Your poets too are dying, your philosophers, your musicians, to whom Europe has listened for two hundred years. Gone. […] Your universities? Oh yes, you have learned men, who collect more facts than do the learned men of England. They collect facts, and facts, and empires of facts. But which of them will rekindle the light within? (43)18

This passage clearly criticizes German imperialism and demonstrates the transition from the liberal and often progressive ideas of ‘Old Prussia’ to the retroactively constructed militarist ‘Prussian myth’ of the Wilhelmine age that accelerated nationalism in Germany and animosity in Britain.19 Forster, however, identifies  Hobson, Imperialism, pp. 210–11.   Childers, Riddle of the Sands, p. 90. 18  The manuscript version of Howards End is a little more forgiving of German scholars in granting them scientific ambition through taxonomy (‘classify facts’) whereas the printed version reduces the endeavour to mere archiving (‘collect facts’). Oliver Stallybrass (ed.), The Manuscripts of Howards End, London, 1977, p. 28, line 17. 19   Under the influence of rhetoricians-as-historians such as Heinrich von Treitschke, ‘Old Prussia’ (which had been incorporated into the German Reich) gradually metamorphosed both at home and abroad into the sabre-rattling German militarist state 16

17

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similarities between German expansionism and British imperialism. The personal pronouns waver tellingly in this passage between the position of the assimilated immigrant (‘our Imperialism’, ‘your poets’, ‘your universities’) and the sceptical emigrant (‘their poets’). From this position of in-between-ness, which will result in the hybridity of the Schlegel sisters, Herr Schlegel assesses both cultures as either exhausted with the realization of global expansionism or brought to a dead end in the aspiration to colonial power. Forster clearly doubts whether the accumulation of knowledge and skills Thomas Richards has called the ‘imperial archive’ could be more than an ‘empire of facts’, if it is merely a positivist tool in the fantasy of dominance that celebrates bigness.20 While Ford had identified similarities between Germans and Anglo-Saxons that were ‘naturally’ of use to the latter because they were a historically hybrid race, able to assimilate precisely because its national character was really profoundly international and therefore modern by default, Forster was a great deal more uncertain about the value of his common denominators, imperialism and modernity. Elizabeth von Arnim’s autobiographical fiction shows a similarly hybrid voice, or an unclear, wavering identification between ‘you’ and ‘we’ such as we see in Forster’s Herr Schlegel. Her light-hearted characterization of life as the wife of a Prussian Junker on a Pomeranian estate tapped into the public interest in ‘national character’ and led to three lucrative sequels to the first novel Elizabeth and Her German Garden (1898), among them The Solitary Summer (1899) and The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rügen (1904). Her theme of Anglo-German romance and her marketing epithet ‘by the author of Elizabeth and her German Garden’ were lucrative enough to have spawned now forgotten imitators: Hedwig in England (1909) by the ‘author of Marcia in Germany’; or the ‘author of Daphne in the Fatherland’ (1912). In the early novels that feature ‘Elizabeth’, the narrator’s voice gives little hint of her foreignness: Miss Jones [the English governess] looked as though she did not like Germans. I am afraid she despises us because she thinks we are foreigners – an attitude of mind quite British and wholly to her credit; but we, on the other hand, regard her as a foreigner, which, of course, makes things very complicated.21 with ultra-conservative attitudes and imperialist ambitions. The old pre-unification Prussia, progressive and politically heterogeneous, was overwritten retroactively with a ‘Prussian myth’ in which Prussian tradition and its political efficacy were put in the service of nationalist polemic. For instance, Prussian military organization and deployment used to be seen as quite controversial (rather than desirable) throughout Germany; similarly, Old Prussia was not thoroughly conservative but had had social democratic urban strongholds and a large moderate contingent in rural areas like Silesia. See E.J. Feuchtwanger, Prussia: Myth and Reality, London, 1970, pp. 198–221. 20  See Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire. London, 1993. 21   Elizabeth von Arnim, Elizabeth and Her German Garden, London, 2003, p. 104.

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The admission of mutual xenophobia aside, it is the ‘we’ and ‘us’ of Elizabeth and Her German Garden that I am interested in here. ‘We’ at best disguises assimilation (von Arnim as a naturalized German subject), at worst denies otherness (von Arnim as a foreigner in Germany). In The Solitary Summer, the narrator’s foreignness is even more obscured: ‘We Germans have all heard of Carlyle’.22 This disguise of foreignness creates a marketable authenticity for her English audience. She does not write about Germany as an New Zealand-born British woman – a white colonial subject married to an imperialist rival – but authoritatively as an unusually polyglot German about Germany, with a keen eye for absurdities and the kind of local detail that might be of interest for an English audience (gardening, landscape and coastline, rural custom, local food). This kind of masquerade actually avoids the complications of colonialism and hybridity; it does not even assume the quasianthropological point-of-view of an immigrant or a traveller with the result that the reader does not have to entertain the notion of hybridity but can conceive of the book as an imported article. When it came to representing Germans in England, however, matters became more complicated for both von Arnim and Forster. Modernity and the Meanings of German Cosmopolitanism Political and economic Anglo-German rivalry is often seen as symptomatic of growing nationalism in the antebellum years, when in fact it existed alongside a cultural counter-discourse of internationalism, cosmopolitanism and imperialist critique. Indeed ‘internationalism’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’ were multivalent and their meanings depended very much on context. Unlike the genteel internationalism we find in Henry James’s treatment of transnational encounters, the relationship between metropolitan culture and foreignness was a contentious issue in Edwardian England. The Oxford English Dictionary lists both a literal understanding of cosmopolitanism as world citizenship (‘belonging to all parts of the world’, ‘free from national limitations or attachments’) as well as contemporary usage that sees this as a political problem, such as a voice from G.B. Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Island (1907) railing against ‘the modern hybrids that now monopolize England: hypocrites, humbugs, Germans, Jews, Yankees, foreigners, Park Laners, [and] cosmopolitan riffraff’.23 Somewhere between homeless and foreign, bohemian and suspicious, the cosmopolitan is here identified as an undesirable form of

22   Elizabeth von Arnim, The Solitary Summer, London, 1993, p. 33, my emphasis. On the first person plural and its difficulties in the context of naturalization and wartime affiliations see Pamela Thurshwell’s reading of Henry James’s homoerotic identification in his wartime writings; ‘“That imperial stomach is no seat for ladies”: Henry James, the First World War and the Politics of Identification’, in Hugh Stevens & Caroline Howlett (eds), Modernist Sexualities, Manchester, 2000, pp. 167–84, at pp. 168–9. 23   http://www.dictionary.oed.com.

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modernity: hybrid and urban. Both criteria permeate the popular, even populist discourse on cosmopolitanism and its highbrow equivalent. For intellectuals, cosmopolitanism remained a sine qua non precisely because it enabled international connections that crossed countries and narrow nationalist agendas: art surely transcended geopolitical boundaries. Max Weber endorsed cosmopolitanism as a form of worldly education, a badge of universal High Culture and gentrification for which he explicitly cited England as a model.24 For A.J. Hobson, cosmopolitanism was the particular form of liberal humanitarianism embodied by thinkers like Goethe, Kant, Rousseau and Lavater, which withered in the growing nationalist movements of subsequent decades.25 Forster subscribed to these definitions in his characterizations of the Schlegels as proponents of middle-class liberal culture. In the original manuscript Forster had emphasized the cosmopolitan strain of the family by making Father Schlegel ‘a distant relation to the great critic’ (presumably August Wilhelm Schlegel) and the countryman of ‘Goethe and Hegel and Kant’.26 His children champion political progress such as female enfranchisement and the liberal arts, often ‘foreign’ in origin or at the very least interested in Things Foreign. High Culture in Howards End is signified through international art exhibitions, Wedekind’s dramas, Beethoven’s symphonies, orientalist fashion, Wagner’s operas, Boecklin’s paintings and Ruskin’s Stones of Venice: here is foreignness made accessible through middle-class education. For Forster, culture is naturally transnational and cosmopolitan, precisely because it produces connections, even though most of his examples are actually German. But so is the modernist metropolis, as Raymond Williams has argued, since in its miscellaneity it accommodates a whole range of cultural practices ‘beyond city and nation in their older senses’.27 Yet the metropolitan avant-garde seems to signify something so peculiarly strange to English life and character that language cannot accommodate it. This point is made by Rose Macaulay, one of Forster’s early readers, for whom ‘Margaret Schlegel in the year 1910 was an authentic young woman in the twenties, a member of the cultured London bourgeoisie, intelligentsia, intellectuals (or whatever foreign alias we cautiously select, as if none of them quite fitted, for the English professional classes)’.28 If the Schlegels don’t quite fit it is precisely because they are so modern in their bi-national hybridity, their inbetween-ness on so many levels. Like all second-generation immigrants of mixed parentage, the Schlegel children Margaret, Helen and Theobald are partly outsiders and partly at the core of social progress and modernity; partly representative of the   Max Weber, ‘National Character and the Junkers’, in Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, London, 1948, pp. 386–95, at pp. 387–8. 25  Hobson, Imperialism, pp. 9–10. 26  Stallybrass, Manuscripts of Howards End, p. 11. The final version plays this down by omitting both the critic and Goethe. 27  Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism, ed. Tony Pinkney, London, 1999, p. 44. 28  Rose Macaulay, The Writings of E.M. Forster, London, 1938, p. 108. 24

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metropolitan culture to which they subscribe and the class to which they belong while also at odds with some of the conservative values and economies that sustain that culture. As Forster’s narrator puts it, they are neither English or German ‘to the backbone’ nor English or German ‘of the dreadful sort’ (42) although everyone in the narrative effectively treats the Schlegels as foreigners, even their aunt Mrs Munt. They never define themselves as Anglo-German but choose complex identities that emphasize internationalism or hybridity as a matter of course. In the manuscript version of Howards End, Forster includes a dialogue between Margaret Schlegel and Mrs Munt in which Englishness is synonymous with assimilation on the highest representational level: ‘How inconceivable that our Royal Family cared about Art.’ ‘Our Royal Family, indeed!’ said her aunt. ‘So you do them the honour to acknowledge them.’ ‘[They’re] as English as I am,’ returned Margaret. ‘Gracious, what a girl it is!’ cried Mrs Munt, half shocked and half admiring.29

Margaret’s choice of pronoun is indeed multivalent. Her aunt interprets Margaret’s ‘our’ as her subjection to British rule – an indication of Margaret’s assimilation, if not her renunciation of ‘foreignness’. For Margaret, however, this pronoun merges personal, dynastic and national history into a heritage of hybridity: the Schlegels, the Hanover dynasty, the Prince Consort, Edward VII: are all incorporated in this ‘our’, which is just as frontal an assault on the homogeneity of Englishness as Ford launched in The Spirit of the People.30 In this early version Forster’s nostalgia for a mythical Anglo-Saxon past is tempered by these reminders that it has been a long time, in fact not since the early eleventh century that the British were ruled by an ‘English’ dynasty: Saxe-Coburg-Gotha follows Hanoverians follow the House of Orange-Nassau follows the Stuarts follow the Tudors follow the Normans... . The discrepancy between dynasty and nation is conveniently ignored in the official nationalism of the time whose virulent rhetoric often concealed a crisis of identity: what did it mean to be English?31  Stallybrass, Manuscripts of Howards End, p. 38 for line 38; p. 39 for line 1.   Forster’s revisions here are understandable if regrettable. In the tense pre-war years, reminders of the German origin of the institutionalized representatives of nationhood must have seemed rather piquant, not least because of the vicissitudes of imperial rivalry and the continued questioning of Prince Edward’s financial involvement with German-Jewish financiers. For a post-war analysis of pre-war anti-German hysteria see Caroline E. Playne, The Pre-War Mind in Britain, London, 1928, and Kennedy’s The Rise of Anglo-German Antagonism. For Edward’s finances see Anthony Allfrey, Edward VII and His Jewish Court, London, 1991; Bryan Cheyette, ‘Hillaire Belloc and the Marconi Scandals’, Immigrants and Minorities, 8/1 (1989): 131–42. 31   As Benedict Anderson has argued, official nationalisms were made possible by popular linguistic nationalisms, and were advocated by conservative interests groups that 29

30

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Hybridity, however, comes at a price as well. There is certainly a suggestion that the Schlegels are perhaps more profoundly deracinated because of their hyphenated identity. They literally cannot settle: ‘we have no real ties’, says Helen when the lease on their family home Wickham Place is about to run out and they have to move (162). Even towards the end of the novel, with the pregnant Helen reunited with her married sister before the novel’s melodramatic climax, this sentiment is reiterated by the sisters: ‘a couple of tourists […] we shall be that everywhere and forever’ (306). Howards End raises the question of what represents ‘England’ and ‘Englishness’ and indicates the possible future of the nation in the legacy of the eponymous Anglo-Saxon farmhouse, but it is also a book about homelessness, about the failure of modern culture to accommodate traditional identities, and of innovation as failure or defeat.32 In a novel that relies heavily on the semiotics of space, it is noticeable how almost everybody is constantly on the move – in motor cars, on trains, on foot, on holiday, moving house, or figuratively, moving between cultures or social classes, if not altogether homeless. Many of the novel’s crucial moments of negotiation and connection are set in ‘contact zones’ between intellect and money, city and country, core and periphery, in liminal spaces such as the antechambers of commercial offices, on the Thames embankment, on the curb of a roadside, in hallways and entrances, on thresholds or in front gardens.33 These spatial signifiers dramatize the uneasy negotiations of modernity and cultural identity with which the novel is so preoccupied and which it cannot easily resolve. On the occasion of the Schlegel siblings’ move, Mrs Munt remembers how the family came to rent their London house Wickham Place in the first place: ‘Your father may have been able to change countries […] and that may or may not have been a good thing. But he could change houses no better than you can, in fact, much worse’. […] ‘I knew it,’ cried Helen. ‘I told you so. It is the little things one bungles at. The big, real ones are nothing when they come.’ ‘Bungle, my dear! […] the furniture was actually in the van and on the move before the lease for Wickham Place was signed, and Emily took train with baby – who was Margaret then – and the smaller luggage for London, without so much as knowing where her new home would be. Getting away from that house may be hard, but it is

felt themselves threatened with exclusion from or marginalization in popular imagined communities (‘Russia’, ‘Japan’, ‘England’). See Anderson, Imagined Communities, London, 1991, pp. 83–112. 32  On the latter point see David Medalie, E.M. Forster’s Modernism, Houndmills, 2002, p. 194. 33  On contact zones see Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, London, 1992, p. 4.

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English Modernism, National Identity and the Germans, 1890–1950 nothing to the misery that we all went though getting into it.’ Helen, with her mouth full, cried: ‘And that’s the man who beat the Austrians, and the Danes, and the French, and who beat the Germans that were inside himself. And we’re like him.’ ‘Speak for yourself,’ said Tibby. ‘Remember that I am cosmopolitan, please.’ (163)

The parental move resembles more a hasty exodus than the foundation of a marital, cross-cultural home, all the more so because, in its temporary lease, Wickham Place leaves the second generation vulnerable to the forces of a dislocating modernity: the Schlegels have to leave because the landlord intends to tear the old house down and build a block of modern flats. Tibby embraces the label ‘cosmopolitan’ because his chosen career as an academic accommodates him physically and metaphorically in one of the most liberal cultural enclaves. Helen, however, who will soon be homeless, sees the complexity of her legacy: being like her father incorporates both loyalty to one’s nation (the wars of unification) and disloyalty (emigration); both a German propensity for abstraction and idealism (‘the big real [questions]’) and an inability to deal with quotidian practical matters (‘the little things one bungles at’). Margaret, who ultimately embarks on the practical project of finding a new house and contemplates renting the Wilcox’s Ducie Street flat is consequently accused by Helen of foregrounding the practical side of their hyphenated state, of an ‘honest-English vein’ (162). When Margaret retorts, ‘It’s a better vein than the cosmopolitan’ (ibid.), her use of this term is equivalent with homelessness and deracination. The Schlegels’ debate uses the two meanings of the term cosmopolitan that constantly collide in the novel: on the one hand, the Kantian legacy translated into liberal values, internationalism in the arts and a metropolitan middle-class lifestyle that affords access to either; on the other, a ‘debased condition of deracination, hybridity, displacement’ that would come to embody the threat to clear definitions of national identity or national interests before the war.34 The antebellum populist discourse on cosmopolitanism hovered somewhat equivocally between these two meanings. Cosmopolitanism often acquired pejorative connotations in relation to specific metropolitan spaces such as the East End, that were habitually populated by immigrants (Continentals, Jews, Chinese),35 and spaces such as Soho that catered for particular forms of entertainment (variety theatre, prostitution, restaurants, nightclubs, opium dens) or facilitated fashionable transnational commerce (department stores like Selfridges 34   Judith R. Walkowitz, ‘The “Vision of Salome”: Cosmopolitanism and Erotic Dancing in Central London, 1908–1918’, The American Historical Review, 108/2 (2003): 337–76, at p. 340. 35  Deborah L. Parsons cites another icon of cosmopolitanism that haunts the metropolis, the flâneur and at times the flâneuse, but she assigns to this bourgeois trope a mythical space rather than a real one; Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City and Modernity, Oxford, 2000, pp. 14, 151.

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or Liberty, often financed by German-Jewish money).36 The popular press classified the audience for and the progenitors of this form of exotic cosmopolitanism as marginal: bohemians and artists, fashionable society ladies and the aristocracy, or the degenerates of the London underworld (criminals, spies and deviants). Cosmopolitanism as a metropolitan feature seemed both exotic and exciting as well as suspect and threatening. The latter aspect is often obscured in accounts of international modernist High Culture that endorse this cultural revolution in the arts for an elite audience, but neglect its anxious reception in broader or populist terms. As war approached and under its hostile influence, the popular suspicion towards the ‘foreign’ elements of High Culture would blossom into the persecution of foreign nationals, institutionalized forms of xenophobia such as alien internment, obscenity trials and scandals in which national difference could easily be used as a shorthand for degeneracy, disloyalty and foreign contamination. During the war, cosmopolitanism ultimately came to signify an unpatriotic deracination, an inclination to political disloyalty and, crucially, ‘a deviation from British decency’ – meanings already latent in its pejorative pre-war connotations.37 These pejorative meanings are certainly palpable in the imperialist view of cosmopolitanism and in Forster’s critique of imperialism in Howards End. The Schlegels are, as the thoroughly ‘English’ Wilcoxes remind themselves at every critical point in their fateful acquaintance with them, ‘foreign’. When Margaret sends inappropriately colourful chrysanthemums to Ruth Wilcox’s funeral, Charles Wilcox comments: ‘She’s a cosmopolitan … I admit I’m rather down on cosmopolitans. My fault, doubtless. I cannot stand them, and a German cosmopolitan is the limit.’ (110) For imperialists, cosmopolitanism is a threateningly mobile hybrid state that allows foreigners to masquerade temporarily as indigenous while harbouring a core of otherness that emerges at crucial moments. Cosmopolitans profoundly unsettle an ideology based on master races and subject races, and they turn the imperial metropolis into a space in which national identity becomes unstable and multivalent – hence the peculiar epithet ‘German cosmopolitan’, which deconstructs and reconstructs nationality at one and the same time. In the antebellum decade in which, according to Frederic Jameson, modernist representations of imperialism tended to focus largely on imperialist rivalry while occluding the exploited colonial subject, visible national difference is crucial for the maintenance of nationalist ideologies.38 Yet the mounting difficulty of unequivocally establishing national signifiers in an increasingly unreadable world, internationalized by global economics and imperialist traffic, is precisely what most popular antebellum fiction is obsessed with. We can see this anxiety about establishing national signifiers in the popular spy fiction of William Le Queux, 36   See Walkowitz, ‘Vision of Salome’, passim; Mica Nava, ‘The Cosmopolitanism of Commerce and the Allure of Difference: Selfridges, the Russian Ballet and the Tango, 1910–1914’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 1/2 (1998): 164–98. 37   Walkowitz, ‘Vision of Salome’, p. 376 38   Jameson, ‘Modernism and Imperialism’, pp. 49–50.

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and the invasion novels of Erskine Childers, H.G. Wells and ‘Saki’, and in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907).39 What sets Ford, Forster and Conrad apart is their conviction that the encounter with the ‘foreign’ or colonial other is never simply unidirectional, enforcing change on the colonial or foreign subject, but always involves a measure of acculturation in the host culture or colonizer as well.40 For Conrad, this is precisely London’s ‘genius of locality’.41 In their rendition of London, the metropolis is invariably somehow ‘un-English’ or at least not synonymous with or representative of England but a thing apart. It also implies that the simple binary opposites of city and country (or in Conrad’s case, imperial core and periphery) are insufficient to encapsulate fully the complexity of modern identities. For the optimistic Ford Madox Ford, the modern metropolis became a medium for assimilation, in which national signifiers were subject to gradual erosion. A phenomenon of modernity, the cosmopolis generated modern individuals whose chief characteristic was their hybridity.42 In The Soul of London the city eradicates difference by unconsciously naturalizing the most alien of immigrants: London is the world town, not because of its vastness; it is vast because of its assimilative powers, because it destroys all race characteristics, insensibly and, as it were, anaesthetically. […] You may watch, say, a Berlin Junker, arrogant, provincial, unlicked, unbearable to any other German, execrable to anyone not a German, turning after a year or two into a presentable and only just not typical Londoner; subdued, quiet in the matters of collars, ties, coat, voice and backbone, and naturally extracting a ‘sir’ from a policeman. London will do all this imperceptibly. And, in externals, that is the high-water mark of achievement of the Modern Spirit. (11–12)

It is important how ‘imperceptibly’ London conducts its de-Prussianization, how destabilizing its force is for national culture, for the Londoner is not synonymous with the Englishman. Thus de-Prussianized, de-provincialized and ‘subdued’, 39  See Michael Denning, Cover Stories: Narrative and Ideology in the British Spy Thriller, London, 1987. 40  Ian Baucom has demonstrated recently how unstable British identity was in the colonies and interprets the establishment of specifically British institutions such as cricket clubs or monuments and buildings not just as colonialist assertiveness but as a shoring up of visible signifiers of cultural identity against ‘foreign’ acculturation; see Baucom, Out of Place. On the distinction between late Victorian urban anxiety and optimistic early modernist renditions of the city see also Sita A. Schutt, ‘“Close up from a distance”: London and Englishness in Ford, Bram Stoker and Conan Doyle’, in Sara Haslam (ed.), Ford Madox Ford and the City, Amsterdam, 2005, pp. 55–67. 41   Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent, ed. John Lyon, Oxford, 2004, p. 108. 42   See Andrzej Gasiorek, Ford among the Aliens, in Dennis Brown and Jenny Plastow (eds), Ford Madox Ford and Englishness, Amsterdam, 2006, pp. 63–83, at p. 71.

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the German military spirit yields to metropolitan transculturation to the point of near-assimilation. It is a credit to the valiant strength of the modern spirit that it softens Prussian backbone. Yet if we understand backbone not in the Forsterian sense of metonymical ‘essence’ but simply as military bearing, then it falls within a perceived national demeanour that includes a range of other signifiers as well. All of these elements – ‘collars, ties, coat, voice and backbone’ – contribute to a phenomenology of national identity that is subject to alteration. As Rebecca L. Walkowitz has demonstrated, in the flux of the imperialist metropolis national signifiers are increasingly subject to mimicry and ‘a performance of requisite effects’ rather than an immutable element of character. Conversely, the conspicuously and identifiably ‘foreign’ is often no more than cosmopolitan artifice constructed for commercialized exoticism. National character consequently rests on the invisibility of effort with which the effect of naturalness is achieved, or with which it is sanctioned by authority, ‘naturally extracting a “sir” from a policeman’.43 Choosing the Berlin Junker as the allegedly most alien and seemingly unyielding specimen of the Teutonic race is meant to underline the transformative powers of the metropolis. For Max Weber, the uncouth Prussian Junker was the symptomatic product of lower-middle-class German parochialism, diametrically opposed to the cosmopolitan gentility of Britain. This provincialism even expressed itself in the particular ‘physiognomy of the parvenu’; in other words, the Junker was the result of having ‘fed aristocratic pretensions to strata which simply lacked the qualifications’.44 The ultra-patriotic, militarist and seriously stupid Junker became a stock character in satirical journals both in Germany (Simplicissimus) and in Britain (Punch). In Germany the Junker represented the regional type of the east Elbian landed gentry that unfortunately wielded considerable political influence in Germany; in Britain he already epitomized imperial(ist) Germany.45 He was mercilessly mocked in Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Caravaners (1909). Yet by the time he became the synecdoche for Germanness, the Junker had already lost a great deal of his political power through national administrative reforms (modelled on English institutions) that championed local self-government rather than semi-aristocratic structures.46 As   Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation, New York, 2006, pp. 44, 49, 53. 44   Weber, ‘National Character and the Junkers’, p. 387. 45   On the historical significance of the Junkers and their satirical representation see Christopher Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947, London, 2006, pp. 167–74. On the anti-Junker tradition in Germany see Heinz Reif, Die Junker, in Etienne François & Hagen Schulze (eds), Deutsche Erinnerungsorte, 3 vols, Munich, 2001, vol.1, pp. 520–36, pp. 526–8. 46   Feuchtwanger, Prussia, p. 201. The German realist Theodor Fontane reflected on contemporary change in the political landscape of the Junkers in his last novel Der Stechlin (1900). 43

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long as the Junker remained in Prussia, von Arnim depicted him as a slightly pompous but ultimately harmless species, more interested in scientific farming and the mores of his tenants than in conquering the world. In The Caravaners, however – at the height of von Arnim’s financial difficulties and marital tensions – the Junker ventures to England and proves an embarrassing spectacle. AntiSemitic, anti-socialist and condescending to women, he could not be more thoroughly other in his overdetermined masculinity: ‘The English are flimsier than we are, thinner blooded, more feminine, more finicking’, remarks Baron Otto von Ottringe of Storchwerder.47 Unbending in his customs and attitudes, he is radically other, all the more so because as a tourist amongst Englishmen he ought to adapt and assimilate (just as von Arnim had adopted the Junkerin voice in her earlier ‘Elizabeth’ books). Yet von Arnim’s ventriloquized Junkerin is of course peculiarly English in tone, suggesting either similarities in character and outlook or (if we bear in mind Punch’s ‘Hints to foreigners’) a lucrative faux-Anglicization of what used to be considered quintessentially German, an incremental dilution of radical foreignness into accessible foreignness for the English market. The problem with the Junker, for von Arnim, is his excessive, unyielding foreignness in rural England. As Ford argues, it takes an international medium like London to adulterate Germanness with cosmopolitanism. London could turn the Junker into an English gentleman because it provided an urban education that made him socially acceptable.48 Two years later, in The Spirit of the People, Ford does not use the Prussian as an example of the most alien race, but as an indication of modernity and desirable cultural similarity. The very assimilative power that he ascribes to the cosmopolitan metropolis in The Soul of London is expanded, in the volume that concludes the trilogy, over the entire populace for whom ‘the almost obsolescent word “race”’ is an inappropriate term for ‘a people so mixed’ already (256). For Forster, too, cosmopolitan urban modernity does not merely result in unidirectional assimilation of the immigrant. As the centre of the British Empire, the cosmopolis produces a mutually transforming hybridity, the host culture’s acculturation and the immigrant’s transculturation: ‘the Imperialist is not what he thinks or seems. He is a destroyer. He prepares the way for cosmopolitanism, and though his ambitions may be fulfilled the earth that he inherits will be grey’ (315). Forster’s sceptical narrator increasingly associates cosmopolitanism with a grey, faceless mishmash, an enervating and pointless ‘chatter’ of voices of different provenance (213) and a loss of a sense of place. It is literally a decolouration, a dis-location and a deracination, a fading away of regional and national identity.   Elizabeth von Arnim, The Caravaners, London, 1989, p. 175.   Elizabeth von Arnim’s naturalization as a British subject in 1914 saved her and the children she had taken with her from deportation and alien internment, but the children’s strong German accents made them so conspicuous as enemy aliens that their lives were severely complicated. See Karen Usborne, ‘Elizabeth’: The Author of Elizabeth and Her German Garden, London, 1986, p. 182. 47

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According to Jed Esty, Forster’s early fiction ‘repeatedly plots or maps the relation of anterior core and modern metropolis as overlapping in space but incommensurate in values, condensing any number of social contradictions […] into his signature trope of a dwindling essence suspended in a thrilling, but disorientating, metropolitan contact zone’.49 In Howards End, we find this trope again, but the tension between the incommensurables is heightened: the contact zone is represented as radically foreign and as an agent of alienation precisely because it invites the foreigner into the heart of the modern imperial nation through trade and administration. Forster’s is not the only ambivalent voice about cosmopolitan modernity, although his critique is in a different vein to that of populist writers such as William Le Queux, John Buchan and ‘Saki’ who thought of themselves as cosmopolitans (educated, well-travelled men of the world) but derided cosmopolitanism in their fiction as foreign infiltration. This contradiction is only odd if one does not recognize that they are really conceiving of two different kinds of cosmopolitanism. The Englishman abroad, taking his or her Englishness with them as if it were an intrinsically sealed quality, possibly even exporting it as a civilizing tool is an ironic trope in Forster’s œuvre. In his pre-war short story ‘The Eternal Moment’, he criticized the behaviour of English tourists abroad ‘holding forth on patriotism and the duty of English tourists to present an undivided front to foreign nations’.50 In Howards End, Forster also juxtaposes the English Wilcoxes’ holiday in Germany, which will lead to the brief amorous delusions between Helen Schlegel and Paul Wilcox, with a later revelation about Henry’s extramarital affair with Jackie Bast on Cyprus (then under British control): ‘Cut off from decent society and family ties, what do you suppose happens to thousands of young fellows overseas? Isolated. No one near. I know by bitter experience’, (242) complains Henry to Margaret once his affair has been revealed. The bitter experience, as Forster’s tale suggests, lies in the social consequences of premarital sex for the woman rather than in the moral ‘contamination’ for the colonizer abroad. Nonetheless, what Wilcox’s phrasing suggests is that being in the colonies somehow stripped him of ‘Englishness’ and removed the sociocultural constraints (‘decent society and family ties’) that would have reigned in his and Jackie Bast’s sexuality: abroad, the English cannot really remain English because the colonies undo their national   Esty, A Shrinking Island, p. 16 and Ch. 1. Howards End is of course well known for its symbolic representation of the Edwardian debate between internationalism and imperial critique on the one hand and nostalgia for national essence and heritage on the other. We might want to remember here the passages on English yeomanry and the quintessential English pastoral (chapter XIX). These nostalgic notions of ‘Englishness’ were in keeping with the renaissance of the pastoral trope in Edwardian and Georgian poetry, perhaps precisely because of technological and demographic changes to the landscape through suburban sprawl and motorization. As Lionel Trilling has noted, ‘“England” becomes a place of refuge for England’; E.M. Forster: A Study, London, 1944, p. 36. 50   E.M. Forster, Collected Short Stories, Harmondsworth, 1963, p. 201. 49

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identity and reveal it as a cultural construct and a mere by-product of cultural geography. It is therefore all the more interesting that he sends his son Paul to Nigeria precisely to remove him from the threat of the foreign at home (Helen Schlegel) – it seems preferable to expose Paul to ‘bitter experience’, to what one supposes happens to thousands of young fellows overseas than to endure this sexual transculturation on home turf. For the narrator in Howards End cosmopolitanism represents a new kind of imperialism, the dictatorship of hybrid modernity with its stinking motor car and suburban sprawl that eats into the pure core of the rural idyll: London was but a foretaste of this nomadic civilization which is altering human nature so profoundly, and throws upon personal relations a stress greater than they have ever borne before. Under cosmopolitanism, if it comes, we shall receive no help from the earth. Trees and meadows and mountains will only be a spectacle, and the binding force that they once exercised on character must be entrusted to Love alone. (256–7.)

Landscape can no longer forge character or identity, Forster predicts, because modernity is reshaping our relationship to this landscape and redirecting our bonds towards people rather than places. Forster’s argument that imperialism denationalizes counters Hobson’s earlier critique in which aggressive imperialism was a peculiar ‘perversion’ of and a ‘retrograde step’ from a healthier nationalism that might have naturally led to internationalism. Imperialism only encouraged nationalism by fostering rivalries between economic empires and through suppression of colonized nations.51 If this is the wrong kind of nationalism, because it deprives people of place and culture-bound identities, Forster’s resolution requires a symbolic space than must reconcile difference as well as bestow identity. German Swords and English Backbone? On Symbolic Hybridity The plot of Howards End increasingly de-hyphenates the Schlegels as the crisis of liberal values and personal relations steers towards a collision between the two families and the modernities they represent. In order to connect, they have first to disconnect. While Helen, secretly pregnant with Leonard Bast’s child, flees to the Continent, Tibby seeks refuge in his Cambridge rooms. Margaret Schlegel, the character entrusted with forging connections and compromises, turns to a more English pragmatism. Part of Margaret’s yielding to conservative values stems from her gradual recognition that the very income that makes her middle-class liberalism possible comes from lucrative ‘Foreign Things’ (28), indicating the extent to which modern capitalism and the imperialist economy had irrevocably  Hobson, Imperialism, pp. 11–13.

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tethered the nation state to a global economy. It appears as if she literally has to settle down to a simpler identity once she is engaged to be married to Henry Wilcox: her world, and by implication her mind, must ‘contract’ from the liberal cosmopolitan lifestyle in touch with the avant-garde to a conjugal retrenchment of regulated social intercourse determined by shooting seasons and class consciousness. Yet she also recognizes that marriage is not merely a giving-in but the most personal testing ground of dialogue, cooperation and – hybridity: It would be no small business to remain herself, and yet to assimilate such an establishment. She must remain herself, for his sake as well as her own, since a shadowy wife degrades the husband whom she accompanies; and she must assimilate for reasons of common honesty, since she had no right to marry a man and make him uncomfortable. (220)

David Gervais has argued that if Margaret is the character to demand connections and effect compromises, she is also the one who is most compromised by her involvement with Englishness, or the kind of Englishness the Wilcoxes represent.52 Yet Margaret does not only seem to make Henry Wilcox ‘uncomfortable’, she ‘charge[s] straight through these Wilcoxes and [breaks] up their lives’ (331) even if she does so on his terms and with his uncompromising methods clothed in Wilcox’s military metaphors.53 I would suggest that Forster’s adherence to hybridity – despite a dislike of cosmopolitanism, despite a nostalgia for placebound Englishness – is palpable in the way in which he literally furnishes the novel’s climax and ending. Father Schlegel’s sword, with which Charles Wilcox beats the father of Helen’s child, symbolizes a misguided patriotism all the more violent for its alleged defensiveness. The combination of a German sword and English backbone (essentialist nationalism and imperialism) does not break only those to whom such violence is meted out but those wielding it as well – an uncanny prophecy of the war less than four years ahead. Howards End, the Anglo-Saxon farmhouse that is twice bequeathed to Margaret Schlegel, is often read as Forster’s nostalgic retrenchment to a mythical Englishness, the house symbolizing a genius loci resting on a narrative of continuity with the Anglo-Saxon past.54 A closer reading of the novel’s resolution suggests Forster’s endorsement of a hybrid identity that supports connectivity, compromise and international coexistence. Firstly, the house may be Anglo52  See David Gervais, Literary Englands: Versions of ‘Englishness’ in Modern Writing, Cambridge, 1994, p. 79. 53  See Elizabeth Langland, ‘Gesturing Towards An Open Space: Gender, Form and Language in Howards End’, in Jeremy Tambling (ed.), E.M. Forster: New Casebooks, Houndmills: 1995, pp. 81–100, p. 91. 54   Yet the explicit artifice of Forster’s romance, with its melodrama and nearsupernatural plot twists, only highlights the mythical status of this localized national identity.

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Saxon but it now houses the Schlegels’ Anglo-German furniture, notably the father’s sword and the English mother’s chiffonier. Secondly, Anglo-Saxonness, as Hugh McDoughall has pointed out, was part of the racial myth in English historiography that, in the Germanophile early and mid-Victorian age, sought to connect Teutonic and English mentalities as traditionally democratic. For nineteenth-century historians such as Stubbs, Kemble, Turner and Green, the hyphen in ‘Anglo-Saxon’ pointed to a Germanic heritage that ensured the very best qualities of Englishness and helped to justify the moral and racial superiority of the British Empire over its subject races.55 The more the so-called national interests of imperialist politics came to be questioned by the liberals, the more important it seemed to conservatives to construct the image of the Anglo-Saxon as devoid of hybridity, particularly its pervasive ‘German strain’. Used thus, the term paradoxically became synonymous with ‘Englishness’ and began to denote a racially pure heritage rather than the hyphenated ethnic and national mixture it historically was. The difficulty in reconciling urban international modernity and a traditional rural sense of place into a homogeneous national concept perhaps bears out Terry Eagleton’s verdict that England merely temporarily housed international modernism rather than offer it a fertile soil in which to grow roots.56 By the time Forster came to deploy the Anglo-Saxon narrative, the hyphen was virtually invisible, the myth challenged by a new generation of historians eager to distance Englishness from any historical or ethnic entanglement with the imperial rival. That Forster’s future for Howards End includes Britons and Anglo-Germans puts the hyphen back into ‘Anglo-Saxon’, advocating a national future that still insists on localized identities but also requires the hybrid and the international. Forster’s closure gestures towards Ford’s ideas on necessary hybridity and even prefigures the more well-known definition of English character as ‘undeveloped’ and in need of international complementation in his ‘Notes on the English Character’ (1920): The English character is incomplete. No national character is complete. We have to look for some qualities in one part of the world and others in another. But the English character is incomplete in a way that is particularly annoying to the foreign observer. It has a bad surface – self-complacent, unsympathetic, and reserved. There is plenty of emotion further down, but it never gets used. There is plenty of brain power, but it is more often used to confirm prejudices than to dispel them. With such an equipment the English cannot be popular. Only I would repeat: there is little vice in him and no real coldness. It is the machinery that is wrong.57 55  Hugh A. McDougall, Racial Myth in English History: Trojans, Teutons, and AngloSaxons, Montreal, 1982, pp. 89–103. 56  See Eagleton, Exiles and Emigrés. 57   E.M. Forster, ‘Notes on English Character’, in Abinger Harvest, London, 1953, pp. 11–24, at p. 23.

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The machinery is of course not just wrong for England, but equally malfunctioning for the rest of Europe, which by 1910 is heading for the cataclysm. But Forster’s symbolic resolution between the local and the cosmopolitan, the national and the international, the hybrid and the assimilated is maybe indicative of the position of a whole generation of intellectuals struggling with a situation in which cultural affiliations and political loyalties seemed increasingly incommensurable.

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Chapter 3

Flirting with the Beastly Hun Imperial Anxiety and Modern Militarism in the Popular Fiction of Buchan, Le Queux and Saki If Forster’s fictional struggle with the condition of England and its international solution required a great deal of symbolic manoeuvring, popular fiction employed fantasy and romance to demonstrate precisely what was at stake in the conflict with Germany. The imperialist idiom of the adventure stories by Erskine Childers and John Buchan is clearly modelled on the works of Henry Newbolt, H. Rider Haggard and Rudyard Kipling and promotes a muscular masculinity as an essential quality of national character. Childers’s and Buchan’s heroes draw on skills from an ‘imperial archive’, as Thomas Richards has called it, which help them defy the German threat. In the antebellum decade, however, this Empire is challenged from within. It is not just imperial rivalry that makes Germany look menacing, but a serious concern over England’s ability to rule justifiably and maintain its realm. Popular fiction formulates this concern more overtly than Conrad’s ambiguous early tales even though national spirit and character – the guarantor of imperial rule – is now openly questioned and debated. Too much rests on this legitimizing fiction to relinquish it easily. In many ways, the First World War and the fictions it produced can be seen as staging this contest as a war against the beastly Hun rather than for a precise ideology or a specific goal. As Peter Buitenhuis has demonstrated in his study of English-language propaganda, the construction of an inimical, bestial other, in essential ways threatening British values and profoundly opposed to Englishness itself, substituted from the start for clear war aims. That Germanic other, according to Modris Eksteins, was increasingly identified with the corrosive foreign modernity that had already caused so much anxiety in the preceding two decades: in its propaganda, England fashioned itself as the preserver of a national legacy of global importance, defending its traditional values against a nation set out to undermine and destroy them. The questionable uses of propaganda would not just devalue the cultural status of literary authorship; one of the corollaries of propaganda and the liberal rhetoric that had legitimized the war was a growing   Buitenhuis, Great War of Words, pp. 9–10.   Eksteins, Rites of Spring, p. 172.

 

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scepticism towards language and its relationship to historical reality that was to inform some of the key modernist works of the post-war years. In Howards End, Forster’s narrator had already warned, ‘the remark “England and Germany are bound to fight” renders war a little more likely each time that it is made, and is therefore made the more readily by the gutter press of either nation’ (74). It is easy to see alarmist journalism and the popular invasion fiction of the pre-war years that sold in stupendous numbers as prefiguring the propaganda excesses of the war years. ‘What Germany Intended to do in 1910’ (Fig. 3.1) is a perfect example of propaganda believing its own fictions and fashioning the casus belli as a preemptive attack rather than the consequence of, among other things, an impossibly complex system of pre-war alliances. More importantly perhaps, the necessity of the image of the barbarous Hun that fuelled such an astonishing output of atrocity propaganda indicates crucial anxieties in the vision of England and Englishness. Many of the popular fictions that work through the Anglo-German conflict before and during the war struggle to define precisely what Englishness is and to articulate unequivocally how Germanness differs from it. While we certainly find stereotypes of Prussian militarism, even the most dystopian or fantastical narratives utilize English national character in a way that critically undermines it as a legitimizing fiction for global hegemony. In fact, spy and invasion fiction demonstrates a lack of imperial confidence despite its reliance on the genres in which colonial adventures were couched. Erskine Childers cannot find any grounds for objecting to German imperial ambitions precisely because he sees the Germans copying and improving British imperial policy. For John Buchan, national character seems to waver uncomfortably between the essential and the performative until it degenerates into mere ‘bluff’. In the novels of William Le Queux and Hector Hugh Munro (Saki) the solution to the English malaise is a social reorganization along military lines that seems to turn Great Britain into Little Prussia. As in Ford’s essays on Englishness, these fictions appear to suggest – sometimes unwittingly, sometimes unwillingly – that the English response to a modern Germany is a modern Germanized England rather than the traditional pastoral visions of Georgian poets or war poetry anthologies. This chapter, then, does not deal with modernist writing in a narrow stylistic sense but with an acutely modern problematic that was worked through in best-selling popular fiction: in the fight against Germany, what did it mean to be English?

   Buitenhuis, Great War of Words, pp. 148–78; Sherry, Language of Modernism, passim.

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Figure 3.1

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What Germany intended in 1910 (handbill, Imperial War Museum)

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Opening the Imperial Archive: The English Hero and the German Peril Spy and invasion fiction articulated and stoked anxieties about Britain’s poor military preparedness for a war with its supreme continental rival and advocated both national service and an increased naval budget – strategies that had helped Wilhelmine Germany to its advanced position. In the simplest case, fending off the national danger of ubiquitous spies and foreign armies required a national hero with a recognizable set of imperial virtues. This was the strategy in Le Queux’s The Invasion of 1910 (1906), in which a highly efficient German war machine landed a large army on the East coast of England. It is not until the last one hundred pages of a seemingly interminable narrative that Le Queux produces his saviour, the aristocratic MP Gerald Graham, ‘a splendid orator […] a distinguished writer and traveller, whose keen brown eyes, upright figure, quick activity, and smart appearance rendered him a born leader of men’. He is also a courageous veteran of the Boer War, as well as an explorer who ‘had led a party through the heart of the Congo and fought his way back to civilization through an unexplored land with valiant bravery that had saved the lives of his companions’. Rallying the country in despair, he founds the National League of Defenders whose ferociousness stems the enemy’s advance and forces a costly truce. Yet in order to beat the Germans, Graham’s league and their supporters have to resort to a brutality that barely distinguishes them from the reputed savagery of the beastly Hun. Leaflets exhort the population to ‘exterminate every single man who has desecrated English soil’. This hearty rhetoric sends forth a guerrilla mob armed with crowbars, hatchets and table legs slaughtering the regular German army and drowning soldiers in the Thames. In the light of such strategies it is difficult to maintain a credible distinction between English civilization and German bellicose brutality. 

 Le Queux’s modest talents leaned heavily on predecessors: the battle scenes relied on inspiration from Tomkyns Chesney’s ‘The Battle of Dorking’ (1871), the roots of the German naval strategy are clearly borrowed from Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands and the hero fits the templates of Rider Haggard’s adventure tales or the Boy’s Own Paper. Le Queux was quickly satirized as a ludicrous scaremonger by the more intellectual serials and notably in P.G. Wodehouse’s The Swoop! (1909). However, he reached a tremendously wide audience through serialization in mass circulation papers such as Northcliffe’s Daily Mail and the Weekly News. The ensuing public paranoia and xenophobia moved official circles to take German espionage seriously despite a dearth of factual evidence. See David French, ‘Spy Fever in Britain, 1900–1915’, The Historical Journal 21/2 (1978): 355–70, and A.J.A. Morris, The Scaremongers: The Advocacy of War and Rearmament 1896–1914, London, 1984. Thomas Boghardt notes a peak of a mere 22 German spies operative in early 1915; from the summer of that year they were no more than 6 spies active in Britain, not all of them of German origin; Spies of the Kaiser: German Covert Operations in Great Britain During the Great War, Basingstoke, 2004, p. 149.    William Le Queux, The Invasion of 1910, with a Full Account of the Siege of London, London, 1906, p. 407.   Ibid., p. 490.

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We find a similar contagion between propagandistically exploited Teutonic brutality and a violent English response to it in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. Winnie Verloc’s brother Stevie reads the story of a German officer half tearing the ear of a recruit with impunity in a cheap tract about the Future of the Proletariat. According to Mrs Verloc: the story was enough […] to make one’s blood boil. But what’s the use of printing things like that? We aren’t German slaves here, thank God. […] I had to take the carving knife from the boy […] He was shouting and stamping and sobbing. He can’t stand the notion of any cruelty. He would have stuck that officer like a pig if he had seen him then. It’s true, too! Some people don’t deserve much mercy.

This passage is not merely ironic in the light of the fact that not a single member of the Verloc ménage will survive. Conrad’s plot revolves around creating the phenomenology of terrorism, the semblance of a foreign threat in order to spur the Home Office into prophylactic action. The real peril lies much closer to home, in the monstrous metropolis, in morbid desires slumbering in domestic spaces, in the fact that modern life produces mere appearances that cannot be trusted. The sobbing idiot with the carving knife (who is eventually blown to bits) and the caring wife stabbing her husband before embarking on a desperate flight that ends in suicide in the English Channel are at times more violent than Prussian soldiers or Russian anarchists. What is exploded in Conrad’s plot as a deep-seated selfdeception is not so much the complacency of the governing bodies and classes but the concept of the English as a peaceful nation. Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands (1903), merging the spy thriller with the adventure genre, avoided perfect cardboard heroes and presented the reader with two flawed protagonists who have to pool resources to save England from the German peril. Their mission is a team effort at masculinity and perhaps indicates that the modern age requires not just individual heroism but more complex skills and a united national effort. Childers’s Carruthers, bored by his life as a lowlevel Foreign Office functionary, must learn to be a proper yachtsman rather than merely look the part. In turn, the swarthy sailor Davies needs Carruthers’s worldly manners and cosmopolitan knowledge to fully unravel the German invasion plans. It is no coincidence that the ability most pressingly needed is navigation, vital for global maritime hegemony. Like Le Queux, Childers needs a leader to rekindle and galvanize national effort. Surprisingly, his model is the German Kaiser: ‘we want a man like this Kaiser, who doesn’t wait to be kicked, but works like a nigger for his country and sees ahead’ (89). His partner Carruthers reluctantly agrees:   Conrad, The Secret Agent, pp. 44–45.   For a reading of The Secret Agent that places it in the context of contemporary invasion fiction and Conrad’s nationalism see A. Michael Matin, ‘“We aren’t German slaves here, thank God”: Conrad’s Transposed Nationalism and British Literature of Espionage and Invasion’, Journal of Modern Literature, 21/2 (1997/8): 251–80. 



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I described her marvellous awakening in the last generation, under the strength and wisdom of her rulers; her intense patriotic ardour; her seething industrial activity, and, most potent of all, the forces that are moulding modern Europe, her dream of a colonial empire, entailing her transformation from a land-power to a sea power […] (90)

For Carruthers, Germany is a dynamic country, ‘seething’ with activity, transforming itself, ‘moulding’ its wider sociopolitical context into a common continental modernity from which the slumbering, ossified island nation seems to cut itself off and by which it might eventually be threatened. From this assessment of Germany’s position it should be clear early on in the narrative that the mysterious navigational manoeuvres Carruthers and Davies observe do not serve to fortify Germany’s coast against invasion but might enable the invasion of England precisely because Germany is acquiring, copying and adapting the skills that furnish the English imperial archive. The Riddle of the Sands, then, is less about unravelling a mystery than about recovering imperial skills from falling into abeyance so that they do not become a mystery. Significantly, the agent of Wilhelmine Germany, the mysterious Dollmann, can only be identified through his imperial skills: It was something in his looks and manner; you know how different we are from foreigners. And it wasn’t only himself, it was the way he talked – I mean about cruising and the sea, especially. […] I felt we understood one another in a way that two foreigners don’t. He pretended to think me a bit crazy for coming so far in a small boat, but I could swear he knew as much about the game as I did; for lots of little questions he asked had the right ring in them. (71)

Dollmann is unmasked as an Englishman in German pay by his national enthusiasm for ‘cruising and the sea’. The crucial difference between the English and ‘foreigners’ is not a Conradian phenomenology of race but an epistemological divide that Germany strives to diminish. In Buchan’s Greenmantle (1917) Hannay respects both the German engineer Gaudian and the seamen of the barge that takes him to Turkey because their skills are drawn from an imperial archive that at times seems less appropriated by the Germans than shared with them. In those instances epistemology acquires a racial, phenomenological tinge again such as when the Frisian seamen behave ‘very like the breed you strike on the Essex coast’.10 For John Buchan’s adventurer-turned-spy, the South African Richard Hannay, the imperial archive provides him with precisely the skills needed to outwit his German pursuers in The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), and the brutish von Stumm and the evil Hilda von Einem in Greenmantle. An experienced soldier, hunter and  See Richards, Imperial Archive, p. 129.   John Buchan, Greenmantle, ed. Kate Macdonald, Oxford, 1993, p. 108. All subsequent references from this edition are cited parenthetically in the text. 

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farmer, he is trained in veldcraft, which also features as a vital skill in BadenPowell’s Scouting for Boys (1908). Initially Hannay experiences the Old Country as insipid and emasculating; indeed The Thirty-Nine Steps suggests colonists are the only real men left (Kipling’s ‘the best ye breed’). The epistemological difference is not between England and ‘foreigners’ but between the vibrant outposts of Empire and its flabby heart; between colonizers and politicians; settler-warriors and civilians. Logically, it takes a colonist to rescue the mother country from the wiles of the German Black Stone. The Empire strikes back, but this highlights, rather than distracts from, England’s weakness as an imperialist nation: if the best have been sent out, this has fatally diminished home stock. Buchan’s argument reverses Conrad’s doubt about the kind of Englishmen populating the British Empire and it pushes further Kipling’s elitist colonialism. If it takes an Empire to ‘make’ a man and to let him exercise his masculinity, what happens to the majority of men who do not engage in the imperial practice of domination? Does England’s imperialism deconstruct Englishness? ‘The Queer Other Side’: Buchan’s Anti-modernity and Teutonic Sex Appeal Buchan, Childers and Saki maintain an already outdated rhetoric of quasi-natural amateurism in the description of vital national skills that distinguishes their heroes from the Germans, who are known for their robotic efficiency, their ‘military machine’ and their insistence on professionalism.11 For Childers, Anglo-German rivalry will be determined by mastery of the naval ‘game’. Yachting was not the only ‘game’, hobby or sport linked so closely to the fantasy of dominance that it became a casual mode of imperialist moulding. Hannay uses the same term for war, espionage and veldcraft. As we shall see, upper-class leisure pursuits such as hunting and shooting in turn determined the shape and rhetoric of imperialist foreign policy, which continued to be conducted, according to the contemporary historian Caroline Playne, ‘as if it were a game, a sport’.12 As we have seen in the previous chapter, for critics of empire like Hobson and Forster the ‘imperial archive’ was no more than an ‘empire of facts’, a positivist tool in the fantasy of dominance. For Childers and Buchan, this archive had been institutionalized as providing social and cultural practices that confirmed national identity and legitimized imperial hegemony. When this archive became accessible to other Western nation states as part of gradual but relentless processes of industrial and economic modernization, the very institution that had guaranteed a racial prerogative occasioned a crisis of Englishness. Hence Le Queux in Spies of the Kaiser (1909): ‘The day has passed when one Englishman was worth ten foreigners. Modern science in warfare has altered all that. […] The art of navigation, the science of engineering, or the trade of carpentering cannot be 11

  See also Ch. 4 for a discussion of professionalism in the context of Englishness.   Playne, Pre-War Mind in Britain, p. 178.

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learned in fourteen days annually – neither can the art of war’.13 Childers suggested the same remedy for deflationary Englishness: ‘Is it not becoming patent that the time has come for training all Englishmen systematically either for the sea or for the rifle?’ (268). Their eventual demands for regular national service and standards of vocational training aspire to a professionalism that is at odds with the national rhetoric of casual amateurism; if the Germans aim to copy an imperial archive associated with Englishness, the English now strive for a regimentation habitually decried as inherently Teutonic. The quest for national efficiency – the widespread debate about national standards required to maintain Britain’s global leadership that led Englishmen to examine and learn from their fiercest rivals Germany, the US and Japan – was perhaps the major social discourse in which approximations between national characteristics seemed possible, even desirable.14 As a result it became much harder to define national identities and to differentiate between them meaningfully without resorting to the stereotypes of prejudice and propaganda. Buchan’s novels demonstrate this uneasy moment of having to negotiate between essentialist and performative notions of identity. The well-known espionage plot in The ThirtyNine Steps revolves around national identity as a literally inhabitable ‘role’. The Germans can operate in Britain undetected because they enact to perfection their aspirations to emulate British imperialism. With veldcraft they become ‘English’: ‘the secret of playing a part was to think yourself into it’; ‘you convince yourself that you are it’.15 Having used the imperial archive against the English, the Germans can only be unmasked by a true colonial like Richard Hannay. Yet this strategy of performance-as-ontology, as Michael Denning has argued, undermines the entire notion of national character.16 In Greenmantle Hannay argues that ‘we are the only race on earth that can produce men capable of getting inside the skin of remote peoples’ (24), apparently an ability that assists colonial stewardship. As in colonial fiction, this ability does not admit to the possibility of transculturation. In Greenmantle Hannay has to pass himself off as a German (presumably a ‘remote’ people in manners and outlook) to be able to traverse Germany on the way to Constantinople: ‘the only way to deal with the Germans was naked bluff’ (87). There is nothing ‘naked’ or essential about national identity here. As the Assistant Commissioner proves in Conrad’s The Secret Agent, it is subject to a habitus of performative signifiers – linguistic peculiarities, specific clothes, local skills or political attitudes. Yet while the Germans may just about be able to impersonate ‘Englishness’, their latent hatred of the English gives them away. Anti-English   William Le Queux, Spies of the Kaiser, London, 1996, p. xxxv.  See Searle, Quest for National Efficiency, Chs 3–5. 15   John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps, ed. Christopher Harvie, Oxford, 1993, pp. 52, 103. 16  Denning, Cover Stories, pp. 42–8. Denning sees the thriller as privileging national consciousness over class consciousness, that is as a publishing phenomenon straddling social divides and nationalism. 13 14

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hatred is indeed often portrayed in the satirical magazines of the time as if it were some defining feature of Germanness. The ‘Study of a Prussian household having its morning hate’ (Fig. 3.2), which appeared in Punch in 1915, suggests in a more humorous way than Conrad’s Author’s note to Victory that Teutonic psychology incorporated the quasi-ritualistic demonization of others. Similar cartoons mocked the Kaiser’s ‘Gott strafe England’ (God punish England) as a response to all political situations. Little attention was paid to the national psychology underlying the same if not an altogether more vicious strategy of demonizing of the Hun in British propaganda. This is where Conrad’s earlier subtlety wins over Buchan’s populist appeal. In Greenmantle it is the articulation of anti-English slogans that saves Hannay’s disguise at crucial moments while Winnie Verloc’s protests against Prussian brutality in The Secret Agent ironically underscore her own capacity for merciless violence.

Figure 3.2

Study of a Prussian household having its morning hate, Punch (1915)

Buchan makes a discernible effort at balanced portrayal with some conspicuous Good Germans, but the villainous Beastly Huns ultimately prove that ‘we’re all a thousand percent better than anybody else’ (24). Early on in Greenmantle Buchan uses an American character to continue the kind of anti-German rhetoric that permeates wartime propaganda: ‘there’s a skunk let loose in the world [and] we’ve got to take a hand in disinfecting the planet’ (21). But it is the arch villains Ulrich

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von Stumm and Hilda von Einem who clearly demonstrate why propaganda was such an indispensable tool of the British war machine. Stumm is the epitome of German modernity derailed by a quasi-religious patriotic fanaticism: ‘Here was the German of caricature, the real German, the fellow we were up against. He was as hideous as a hippopotamus, but effective. Every bristle on his odd head was effective’ (50). It is difficult not to see the propagandist Buchan in such contorted ‘characterizations’ that appear to make an effort at self-consciousness and differentiation (‘caricature’) only to confirm the stereotype of the savage German as ‘real’. The effectiveness of this savagery needs to be read in the context of Hannay’s experience of Germany, and in particular of the capital city Berlin as soullessly efficient, a ‘big factory’ giving ‘an impression of ugly cleanness and a sort of dreary effectiveness’ (49). Hardly a supporter of the modern quest for efficiency, Buchan, in his personification of von Stumm, rejects the demands for professionalism we saw surfacing in Childers and Le Queux. German modernity, according to Buchan, is not really progress in a civilizatory or socio-industrial sense, but constitutes evolutionary stagnation if not a regression. Specimens like von Stumm are ‘back numbers’ and belong to the ‘Stone Age’ (83), hence the many animal similes applied to von Stumm. On top of his enjoyment of sadistic cruelty, he displays a curious taste in interior design that suggests deviancy of a more threatening nature: It was the room of a man who had a passion for frippery, who had a perverted taste for soft delicate things. It was the complement to his bluff brutality. I began to see the other queer side to my host, that evil side which gossip has spoken of as not unknown in the German army. The room seemed a horribly unwholesome place, and I was more than ever afraid of Stumm. (79)

Assigned to covert operations in ‘a dashed queer country’ (56), Hannay uncovers a vice that during the war was eagerly associated with Germany, and whose export was deemed a German war strategy, as the trial of Maud Allan and the banning of Rose Allatini’s novel Despised and Rejected demonstrate.17 In the scene above, homosexuality is portrayed as a national characteristic rather than a situational contingency of military life. The combination of sadism and effeminacy in the image of the sadistic homosexual is vaguely reminiscent of Guy de Maupassant’s ‘Mademoiselle Fifi’ or D.H. Lawrence’s ‘The Prussian Officer’, both more extended treatments of the homoerotic, sadomasochistic dynamics within military environments. This is a scene of homosexual panic that is soon exorcized in a thoroughly masculine punch-up in which Hannay resolutely defeats his outsized enemy. The next adversary is the formidable Hilda von Einem, a woman of   For a parallel reading of Allatini’s banned novel Despised and Rejected and the Maud Allan trial, see Deborah Cohler, ‘Sapphism and Sedition: Producing Female Homosexuality in Great War Britain’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 16/1 (2007): 68–94. 17

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inexplicable, mesmeric sexual allure that emasculates the hero into a catatonia of shyness as she sizes him up like a horse and reduces him to his lack of sexual experience. Significantly, Hannay feels both the threat and the fascination of the emasculating sexualities his enemies represent. In the climactic chapters in Greenmantle, the homosocial Allied quartet of male friends fights valiantly against von Stumm’s phallic artillery and Hilda von Einem’s psychosexual hold over Hannay’s friend Sandy. Both meet an appropriate end: von Einem is killed by a shell and von Stumm is literally crushed by an engulfing enemy mob. The Allied victory underlines the natural bonds between the four friends in the manner of Kipling’s Stalky & Co: clean, white, straight, masculine. This release is not as appalling as the sexual scenario in Kipling’s ‘Mary Postgate’ (1915), in which the eponymous protagonist vengefully exults in the agonizing death of a German pilot, but it serves a similar function. In those scenes Buchan’s hero articulates most clearly the relationship between the construction of inimical otherness and the underlying sociocultural anxieties that guide the plot’s denouement: ‘I had got out of the way of regarding the thing as a struggle between armies and nations. […] First and foremost it was a contest between the four of us and a crazy woman’ (191). The sexualization of Hannay’s German antagonists and the gain in masculinity through their defeat for the victorious Englishman is perhaps a logical consequence of the sexualized rhetoric of much war propaganda, notably the infamous Bryce report.18 This endlessly exploited catalogue of alleged German atrocities during the invasion of Belgium found plenty of echoes in the poster campaigns that were supposed to boost recruitment figures by appealing to the chivalrous instincts of Englishmen eager to stem the barbarous tide of Teutonic aggression. ‘You have read what the Germans have done in Belgium,’ proclaimed one poster. ‘Have you thought what they would do if they invaded this country?’19 The German as sex monster mobilized sexual anxieties that represented recruitment and trench warfare as the protection of women and children; yet this representation is perhaps also a peculiar displacement of sexual aggression and anxiety onto a demonized alien other that Edwardian civilian society could not articulate otherwise. War would rid society of modern decadence precisely because sex and modern art were just another devious way in which the Hun tried to undermine British morale, morality and health. In 1916 Lord Alfred Douglas’s satirical ‘The Rossiad’ openly equated Germany and homosexuality: Two foes thou hast, one there one here, One far, one intimately near, Two filthy fogs blot out thy light: The German, and the Sodomite.20   See Buitenhuis, Great War of Words, pp. 27–8.   Imperial War Museum, London, Poster Collection PRC69 PST/4904. 20   Cited in Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde’s Last Stand, New York: Arkade, 1997, p. 18 19

23.

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The scandalous Maud Allan trial in 1918 was another case in which (homo)sexuality, and sexual knowledge could be constructed as a foreign perversion: because the Canadian-born dancer had trained in Berlin, was a friend of Margot Asquith (who harboured well-known German sympathies) and had performed the known sodomite Wilde’s Salome for ‘The Cult of the Clitoris’, she was also somehow involved in a large Secret Service operation in which German agents blackmailed British ‘perverts’ in High Places to betray their country.21 In an article entitled ‘Efficiency and Vice’ Arnold White, then editor of the English Review, warned that ‘The Cities of the Plain perished, not because they were wicked, but because their inhabitants were inefficient […] The tendency in Germany is to abolish civilization as we know it, to substitute Sodom and Gomorrah for the New Jerusalem, and to infect clean nations with Hunnish erotomania’.22 Undoubtedly war-time hysteria is to blame for such peculiar outbursts, but they feed on an already established perception that links corporeal modernity and Germany: only medical experts, traitorous perverts and Germans knew what a clitoris was, for no one else, it seemed, ‘had […] ever heard of this Greek chap Clitoris they’re all talking of’.23 Disregarding British pioneers like Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis, sexology and psychoanalysis continued to be associated with German-speaking Central Europe and therefore with a dangerously liberal attitude that placed these corrupting medical discourses in the proximity of the perverse and the downright illegal. In the Maud Allan trial, that well-known authority on sexual irregularity Lord Alfred Douglas opined that Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis had not only been significant source material for Wilde’s play but was deemed pornographic rather than scientific by British medical authorities who had had presumably seen through the mantle of medical rhetoric to its rotten core.24 In 1902 the British Medical Journal had considered the most recent (tenth!) edition of Krafft-Ebing’s work a ‘most repulsive’ book.25 Edward Carpenter’s The Intermediate Sex (1909) received a long, hostile review in the same journal as a ‘low-priced book of no scientific or literary merit, advocating the culture of unnatural and criminal practices’.26 British medical discourses did not necessarily see sexology or indeed ‘pathological’ sexuality as part of its remit   Michael Kettle, Salome’s Last Veil: The Libel Case of the Century, London, 1977, pp. 67–9, and Ch. 1. On the peculiar wartime logic of this legal scandal, see also Hoare’s Oscar Wilde’s Last Stand and Jodie Medd, ‘“The Cult of the Clitoris”: Anatomy of a National Scandal’, Modernism/Modernity, 9/1 (2002): 21–49. 22   Cited in Kettle, Salome’s Last Veil, p. 6. 23  Diana Cooper to Duff Cooper about Lord Albemarle on entering the Turf Club; cited in Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture, London, 1990, p. 232. See also Chs 5 and 6 for analyses of British perceptions of the German body and German corporeal modernity. 24  See Kettle, Salome’s Last Veil, p. 173. 25   Cited in Roy Porter and Leslie Hall, The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain, 1650–1950, New Haven, 1995, p. 163. 26   Cited ibid., p. 162. 21

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but were very anxious to restrict circulation of such knowledge to the medical community – hence the alarm at the work’s affordability. Iwan Bloch’s The Sexual Life of Our Time could only be reissued in 1909 on condition that it be sold to no one but doctors. The link between sexual knowledge and sexual practice (to which medical practitioners were presumably immune) was one made habitually in the pamphlets of social purity movements and moral vigilance groups.27 The first volume of Havelock Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex, which largely dealt with homosexuality, was banned as obscene, and until Ellis found a British publisher for the Studies in 1937 he could only publish in the USA in a limited and expensive edition. English censorship excluded ‘pathological’ sexuality from national discourses and therefore automatically turned it into something pornographic and foreign that threatened from outside, possibly hiding a more thorough moral corruption. As Conrad argued in The Secret Agent, foreign pornography was merely a front for much more alarming anarchy which strove to undermine British society. If war propaganda aimed at establishing a dichotomy between clean, civilized Englishmen and savage, perverse Teutons, it actually resorted to the violent rhetoric of hatred and brutality that it habitually described as an essentially German trait. A surprising number of posters called for the ‘crushing’ of the Hun, for the end of ‘the German idea’ in radical rhetoric reminiscent of Kurtz’s dictum ‘exterminate all the brutes’ or Buchan’s American willingness to ‘disinfect the planet’ to rid it of the German skunk.28 Kipling’s ‘The Beginnings’ firmly rejected the idea that hatred was ‘taught by the state’ or ‘part of [English] blood’ when much of his output was indeed part of a covert government-sponsored publishing campaign in the service of propaganda.29 German propaganda responded to the persistent demonization of their troops and ridicule of German Kultur with statistical posters that compared cultural and social investment and industrial output between warring nations. If, post-Belgium, the British derided Kultur as barbarity and purported to defend Civilization, the Germans felt the need to reclaim the term as synonymous with modernity and explained pictorially what Kultur was capable of achieving. Louis Oppenheim’s propaganda poster ‘Wir Barbaren!’ (Fig. 3.3) fits this remit. The point here was to suggest that Germany was indeed a progressive nation, leading in philosophy, art, and music; superior in literacy, social equality and productivity – a country so concerned over its citizens’ welfare was surely anything but ‘barbarous’.

  See Marshik, British Modernism and Censorship, p. 3.  See for instance Imperial War Museum poster collection, PRC21 PST/5091 and PRC39 PST/5084. 29  Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Beginnings’, in The Complete Verse, Kyle Cathie, 1990, p. 553. 27 28

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Figure 3.3

Wir Barbaren! Imperial War Museum

What manifests itself as an international conflict in Buchan’s fiction, then, is a projection onto the Germans of a national crisis or a cluster of ‘social problems’: homosexuality; independent-minded women with sex appeal (who might want political franchise); Liberalism; modernity; pacifism; effeminacy

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and degeneration; drawing-room imperialism and Jewish ‘influence’. The crucial battle in Greenmantle is a way of purging those elements by defeating the enemy and by finding moral and physical regeneration in battle. The plot demands a redemptive militarism. War as a quasi-eugenic remedy for a crucial weakness in national character was a frequent trope of propaganda writing. In Inter Arma (1916) Edmund Gosse advocated ‘the flashing of the unsheathed sword’ as if it were some patent medicine of the kind Edwardian culture prodigiously advertised for all manner of ills: It is the sovereign disinfectant, and its red stream of blood is the Condy’s Fluid that cleans out the stagnant pools and clotted channels of the intellect. […] we have awakened from an opium-dream of comfort, of ease, of that miserable poltroonery of ‘the sheltered life’. Our wish for indulgence of every sort, our laxity of manners, our wretched sensitiveness to personal inconvenience, these are suddenly lifted before us in their true guise as the spectres of national decay.30

This passage encapsulates the paradox of British propaganda that on the one hand defends Civilization and on the other dismisses its achievements as enfeebling, as a form of modern disease; that rails against the primitive savagery of the Hun but embraces a violence far removed from gallant soldiery and barely distinguishable from lawless barbarism. Conan Doyle, too, saw the trench as morally salutary in ‘His Last Bow’ (1917): ‘a cleaner, stronger, better land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared’.31 The pervasive sense of moral decay and physical weakness in the antebellum years would be overwritten a decade or so later with a brooding nostalgia for an equally fictitious pre-war idyll. Perhaps more important here, however, is the strange juxtaposition of blaming German aggression for the war and greeting it as an overdue wholesale remedy for national decline. Buchan’s propaganda fiction presents us with this peculiar rationale, but we need to look at an earlier novel, Saki’s radical dystopia When William Came: A Story of London Under the Hohenzollerns (1913), in order to get a sense of the reluctant cultural approximations that underlie such a logic. Saki’s ‘Blood-wet Laurels’: From Nationalist Pastoral to Redemptive Militarism Saki’s novel sets up an inverse imperial dynamic: the British are now vanquished and colonized by the Beastly Hun; rather than a ruling race, they are a subject people. In the ambiguous politics of his last novel, he dismantles the myth of   Edmund Gosse, Inter Arma, London, 1916, p. 3.  Arthur Conan Doyle, His Last Bow: Some Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes, ed. Owen Dudley Edwards, Oxford, 1993, p. 172. 30

31

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England as a unified nation capable of individual or collective heroism and constructs an ineffectual, ailing protagonist who comes to symbolize its key weaknesses. Murrey Yeovil represents the Edwardian traveller and sportsman who came to replace the late nineteenth-century colonial adventurer but his illness deprives him of the chance to prove those virile qualities that through hunting, shooting and field sports had come to express British global dominance in the late nineteenth century.32 Fatefully delayed on his return from Siberia, Yeovil is reduced to watching the rearguard action of the imperial social elite, his physical incapacitation synonymous with a patriotic failure to help defend his country. Among the cultural atrocities the Beastly Hun inflicts upon England is the import of modern art and socialism, the infiltration of cosmopolitan Jewry in social and financial circles, bilingualism in public spaces, and the imposition of vulgar German middle-class taste. Saki’s view of the English is almost identical to Buchan’s: the true-blue Englishmen are those in colonial service, those who have managed to retain the position of the white ruling race and have emigrated to India, the only remaining British colony. The worst specimens of society fully collaborate with the German occupiers: Jews, homosexuals, society ladies, social parvenus and the working classes. Saki’s idea of ‘nation’ therefore excludes most of the population as unpatriotic, indifferent, feminine, poor or ‘deviant’. Deprived of national support, Yeovil retreats into a pastoral existence that epitomizes a timeless nature reserve of upper- and upper middle-class conservative Englishness, a literalized ‘Torywood’. This is a curiously inverted version of Rupert Brooke’s later vision of the green and pleasant land in a ‘foreign field’. In Howards End, Forster juxtaposed a cosmopolitan modernity and a rural, traditional Englishness. For Saki, that modernity is actualized in a Germanic invasion against which traditional Englishness forms a last bastion: gentrified Georgian idylls with hunting grounds, shooting seasons and country lanes free of ghastly modern motor cars remain the nostalgic loci of traditional values that used to provide opportunities for the leisured gentleman to prove his virile masculinity and his aptitude for colonial service in blood sports. In Saki’s dystopia, hunting and shooting are the ‘civilized’ versions of militarism and imperialism that now serve a reclusive patriotism: A good many hunting seasons will have to come and go before we can think of a war of independence as even a distant possibility, and in the meantime hunting and horse-breeding and country sports generally are the things most likely to keep Englishmen together on the land. That is why so many men who hate the German occupation are trying to keep field sports alive, and in the right hands.33

32  See Richards, Imperial Archive and John MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism, Manchester, 1988, pp. 50–51. 33   Saki, When William Came, in The Novels and Plays of Saki, London, 1933, p. 200. All subsequent references to this edition are cited parenthetically in the text.

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England might be re-Anglicized by country sports, but it was definitely lost on ‘the golf-links’, meaning in leisured activities that had little value for character building (199). Saki’s true patriots cannot relinquish ‘the land’ as a national trope and a way of life, whether it is rural England or the hills and plains of India, maintaining the tradition of English country life as best they can in a (now) foreign field. As in later war propaganda ‘the land’ and its traditions become a patriotic and nostalgic metaphor evoked time and again in trench anthologies and war posters. Over the course of his fictional wartime experiences, Buchan’s Richard Hannay undergoes a process of Anglicization that turns him from a crafty South African in The Thirty-Nine Steps to a Britisher in Greenmantle until, during a journey through the Cotswolds, England literally takes hold of him in Mr Standfast: ‘I had a new home. I understood what a precious thing this little England was, how old and kindly and comforting, how wholly worth striving for. The freedom of an acre of her soil was cheaply bought by the blood of the best of us’.34 Even if the imperial core is increasingly the weakest element in the administration of Empire, the invocation of the force of English ‘soil’ (Buchan) or ‘land’ (Conrad) in the formation of national character seems sufficient to reassure Englishmen of the essence of their identity and the validity, even superiority, of their values. Yet not even Saki’s rural bulwark of Englishness is beyond Teutonic influence precisely because it furnishes some of the inventory of the – now shared – imperial archive. During the fox-hunting season Yeovil befriends the affable German officer von Gabelroth and realizes that he does not find himself ‘rigidly intolerant of the sprinkling of Teuton sportsmen who hunted and shot down in his part of the country’ (283), precisely because they share a love of field sports and natural history (279). Indeed one might do well to remember here that one of the key genteel blood sports of the nineteenth century, the battue, was imported from Germany under the influence of Prince Albert, who promoted not only the gothic style of hunting lodges but also the rediscovery of remoter regions of the British Isles for shooting and hunting.35 As we shall see, Yeovil’s gradual acquiescence to the presence of Germans in his domain is only one of the signs of Anglo-German affinity that dismantle the novel’s construction of alterity. It is only a small step from the sporting to the military aspects of imperialism. For Hobson they go hand in hand: ‘The desire to pursue and kill either big game or men can only be satisfied by expansion or militarism’ (214). The gentlemanly uses to which ‘the land’ is being put both condition and confirm a way of thinking that logically leads to empire or war. It is in those patriotic class markers of stewardship and dominance that we see how militarism manifested itself in less conspicuous forms such as conscription, garrison towns and duelling manias, but was part of a way of life and ‘an integral part of liberal political culture’, as Anne Summers has argued.36   John Buchan, Mr Standfast, ed. William Buchan, Oxford, 1993, p. 15.   MacKenzie, Empire of Nature, pp. 22, 28. 36  Anne Summers, ‘Militarism in Britain before the Great War’, History Workshop Journal, 2 (1976): 104–23, at p. 105. 34 35

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As clever imperialists, the Germans adapt and improve Britain’s strategies for governing subject races. In the social and cultural sphere, the Germans govern their British colony almost by a version of indirect rule, co-opting indigenous structures of leadership where possible and offering economic incentives and protectionism against taxes. This uncharacteristic Hunnish moderation echoes British practices and gives those sitting on the fence, such as Yeovil’s wife, hope for a form of cultural and political assimilation through which they might claw back some power: We are not scattered to the winds or wiped off the face of the earth, we are still an important racial unit. […] We may arrive at the position of being the dominant factor in [the German] Empire […] impressing our national characteristics on it, and perhaps dictating its dynastic future and the whole trend of its policy. Such things have happened in history. (198)

Hunting and shooting give way here to the wiles of diplomacy, but it is a diplomacy couched in fairly aggressive, imperialist terms. The habit of supremacy is difficult to break and surfaces in the desire to dominate, impress and dictate, striving within collaboration for a version of indirect rule. The adjectives and verbs in this passage actually strip the moderate and paternalistic form of British imperialism of its restraint. When Cicely Yeovil contemplates ‘impressing our national characteristics’ on the German occupiers, she does not contemplate hybridity as a state of pragmatic coexistence, but as a form of quasi-genetic crossing in which the English would naturally provide the dominant strain: The conquerors might partially Germanize London, but, on the other hand, if the thing were skilfully managed, the British element within the Empire might impress the mark of its influence on everything German. The fighting men might remain Prussian or Bavarian, but the thinking men, and eventually the ruling men, could gradually come under British influence, or even be of British blood. And English Liberal-Conservative ‘Centre’ might stand as a bulwark against the Junkerdom and Socialism of continental Germany. (220)

The implication of this cross-fertilization of skills for a new Anglo-German imperial archive is a fantasy of a militarized conservative Britain in which Germany provides the defence of the realm. Yet the Germans turn out to be both excellent soldiers and shrewd administrators. Not only have they internalized the British imperial archive, they are expanding it, and because Saki acknowledges them as competent imperialists, the novel runs the risk of presenting what is meant to be a national cataclysm as a model occupation from which the British might learn. What training did the conquering Germans provide that the vanquished British neglected? Like earlier invasion and espionage narratives, When William Came revealed the constant fear amongst conservatives about the vulnerability of the British

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Empire.37 One of the symptoms of the imperial crisis of the antebellum years was domestic complacency and widespread indifference to the demands of the Empire. In The War in the Air (1908), Saki’s contemporary H.G. Wells mocked the chivalric notions of imperial combat still constructed by juvenile fiction and boys’ magazines as obsolete fantasies disseminated to the lower middle classes by the public library. His reluctant hero Bert Smallways is ‘ready to die – by proxy in the person of anyone who cared to enlist – to maintain his hold’ over the empire.38 For Bert’s patriotism is that of a rather absent-minded imperialist, of the sort who appreciates the half-day off on Empire Day and for whom frontier spirit might be an alcoholic beverage rather than an attitude. Saki’s solution to foreign threat and domestic malaise in this context of anxious imperialism is a kind of redemptive militarism. His novel ends, programmatically, with a defiant boycott by Boy Scouts scheduled to parade in front of German nobility.39 The Scout movement, alongside other paramilitary and military organizations, embodied ‘Edwardian anxiety about physical decline, loss of racial energy and the mounting challenge from European rivals’ – precisely the reasons why, according to Saki’s When William Came, Britain is defeated and easily colonized.40 The very first edition of Scouting for Boys in 1908 was deeply concerned with national health, fitness and efficiency as well as military training. As John MacKenzie has argued, Baden-Powell’s advocacy of hunting and shooting clearly sugared the pill of imperial defence,41 but he was quite unequivocal that the imperial archive ultimately served the state: ‘every boy ought to learn how to shoot and obey orders, else he is no more good when war breaks out than an old woman’ – ‘when’ war breaks out, not ‘if’.42 One of the reasons why the Scouts were so popular, according to Robert Macdonald, was precisely because the movement offered a resolution to the perception of national decline and imperial crises by combining conservative morality and popular imperialism in its scouting and citizenship training.43 Invasion fiction contributed to the universal call to arms as much as the imperialist propaganda incorporated in the curricula and ethos  See for instance Morris, The Scaremongers, p. 382; Kennedy, Rise of AngloGerman Antagonism, p. 466. 38  H.G. Wells, The War in the Air, ed. Patrick Parrinder, London, 2005, p. 73. 39   Sandie Byrne identifies Saki’s advocacy of the Scouts in this novel as a late political turn and a change from his earlier short fiction and journalism, where the Scouts were derided as was militarism in general. See The Unbearable Saki: The Work of H.H. Munro, Cambridge, 2007, pp. 253–4. 40   Michael Paris, Warrior Nation: Images of War in British Popular Culture, 1850– 2000, London, 2000 p. 109; see also Robert H. MacDonald, Sons of Empire: The Frontier and the Boy Scout Movement, 1890–1918, Toronto, 1993, introduction. 41   MacKenzie, Empire of Nature, p. 50. 42  Robert Baden-Powell, Scouting for Boys, ed. Elleke Boehmer, Oxford, 2004, p. 11. 43   MacDonald, Sons of Empire, p. 157. 37

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of public schools or paramilitary and military unions like the Boys’ Brigade, the Anglican Church Lads’ Brigade, cadet forces, rifle clubs, the Territorial Force, the League of Frontiersmen and Lord Roberts’s National Service League.44 When Saki’s colonized Englishmen and women learn that they are to become part of a demilitarized zone, they discover that militarism is a crucial element of their national identity: Every now and then […] I have come across lads who were really drifting to the bad through the good qualities in them. A clean combative strain in their blood, and a natural turn for adventure, made the ordinary anaemic routine of shop or warehouse or factory almost unbearable for them. What splendid little soldiers they would have made, and how grandly the discipline of a military training would have steadied them in after-life when steadiness was wanted. The only adventure that their surroundings offered them has been the adventure of practising mildly criminal misdeeds without getting landed in reformatories and prisons. […] think of […] those boys who might have been marching long to the tap of the drum, with a laugh on their lips instead of Hell in their hearts. (230)

Clearly these lads are really empire boys. Note how English militarism and aggression are presented as positive racial ingredients presumably different from their Prussian manifestation: the ‘clean combative strain in the blood’ and his ‘natural turn for adventure’ predestine the boy for life in the colonies. Tellingly, it is a clergyman who bemoans the decay in disciplined manliness, and we might want to remember how easily the muscular Christianity of the late Victorians was transformed into Anglican support for militarism before the war45 – a concern already formulated in Hobson’s Imperialism. In Saki’s pedagogic rationale for conscription and militarism, male aggression is channelled into and ‘steadied’ by a disciplined, moral and hegemonic masculinity necessary for military institutions as well as civil society. This is precisely the argument that was used in late nineteenth-century Germany to promote conscription and justify an everincreasing military budget.46 Civil society allegedly benefits from the removal of its more volatile members whose minds and bodies are to be disciplined into directive combat against a national enemy, or at least for the defence of empire. This strategy manifests itself in the paramilitary character of the Scout movement. It also surfaces in the peculiarly corporal exercises for Empire Day and in the papers of the Duty and Drill Movement in which the establishment promoted ‘hardness’,  See for example John MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire, Manchester, 1984 and J.A. Mangan, The Games Ethic and Imperialism: Aspects of the Diffusion of An Ideal, Harmondsworth, 1985. 45  See Summers, ‘Militarism in Britain’, pp. 117–21. 46  See Ute Frevert, A Nation in Barracks: Modern Germany, Military Conscription and Civil Society, trans. Andrew Boreham with Daniel Brückenhaus, Oxford, 2004, pp. 201–21 passim. 44

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‘grit’, ‘duty’ and ‘sacrifice’ as key virtues for the nation’s youth if it were to hold on to its Empire.47 For Saki, it seems a small step from the public school cadet corps or the Scout parade to conscription. Indeed, the latter might provide a school for manliness in which character is steadied and the mind stimulated by adventure and the body is steeled against the threat of urban degeneracy. Marching to the tap of the drum becomes part of an aspirational muscular masculinity at the very moment when Britain is declared a demilitarized nation: A group of lads from the tea-shop clustered on the pavement and watched the troops go by, staring at a phase of life in which they had no share. The martial trappings, the swaggering joy of life, the comradeship of camp and barracks, the hard discipline of drill yard and fatigue duty, the long sentry watches, the trench digging, forced marches, wounds, cold, hunger, makeshift hospitals, and the blood-wet laurels – these were not for them. Such things they might only guess at, or see on a cinema film, darkly; they belonged to the civilian nation. (233)

Here militarism is the romanticized glorious adventure of boys’ magazines that, according to Michael Paris, have kindled in generations of readers the desire to belong to the warrior nation that forged the British Empire. This rhetoric would also pervade war propaganda and, together with censorship, protect both new recruits and the civilian population from the realities of the Western Front.48 And yet the reference to the cinema ultimately consigns this romance to the realm of the remote and the exotic in a narrative constantly destabilized by its doubt in the virility of British imperialism. It is important that the British boys see German troops marching by and that their dismal future of a civilian life is represented to them as a masculinity manqué, an abyss of boredom, degeneration and domesticity of which they were warned in Scouting for Boys. In many ways, Saki shows the same mixture of ‘domestic anxiety and colonial enthusiasm’ that Allen Warren finds in Baden-Powell’s early writings on scouting.49 47

  See Anne Bloomfield, ‘Drill and Dance as Symbols of Imperialism’, in J.A. Mangan (ed.), Making Imperial Mentalities: Socialisation and British Imperialism, Manchester, 1990, pp. 74–93, at p. 82. See also Essays on Duty and Discipline. A Series of Papers on the Training of Children in Relation to Social and National Welfare, London, 1910. On the military character of the Scouts, see Joseph Bristow, Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man’s World, London, 1991, and MacDonald, Sons of Empire, Chs 5, 6. 48   For representative analyses of this rhetoric, see Buitenhuis, Great War of Words; Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, Oxford, 1975; Sherry, Language of Modernism, Ch. 1. 49  Allen Warren, ‘Citizen of the Empire: Baden-Powell, Scouts and Guides and an Imperial Ideal, 1900–1940’, in John MacKenzie (ed.), Imperialism and Popular Culture, Manchester, 1986, pp. 232–57: p. 240. Warren demonstrates a gradual turning away from Tory imperialism to internationalism in Baden-Powell’s revisions of later editions of his manual.

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Yet British militarism had to be seen to be essentially different from German militarism.50 In the antebellum public debate about conscription, the National Service League (many of whose officers were also in the Scout movement) promoted conscription to at least ‘arrest the decline of Britain’s international status’ and ‘promote imperial unity’.51 The League was careful not to antagonize potential supporters by avoiding any comparison to Germany or indeed the insinuation that free-born Englishmen should and could be turned into Prussian robots. That is why it eventually modelled its demands for service on neutral Switzerland. In the envious and nostalgic British gaze on the militarized German body in When William Came, Saki eradicates national difference by implying that muscular militarism of the type exhibited by the Germans is precisely what forged and sustained the British nation and her empire. The ‘swaggering joy of life’ no longer symbolizes merely Prussian militarism; that swagger ought to be as much British as it is supposedly German, because it is primarily the way of life of masculine men in a muscular empire. In King Solomon’s Mines (1885) Rider Haggard had admired the soldiery of noble African tribes alongside German militarism as a most sensible way of deploying masculinity in the defence and fortification of empire.52 In an article for the Morning Post in 1915, Saki finally extolled the virtues of war as a part of a national habitus: The Thirty Years’ War was one of the most hideously cruel wars ever waged, but, in conjunction with the subsequent campaigns of the Great Louis, it throws a glamour over the sense of the present struggle. The thrill that those far-off things call forth in us may be ethically indefensible, but it comes in the first place from something too deep to be driven out; the magic region of the Low Countries is beckoning to us again, as it beckoned our forefathers, who went campaigning there almost from force of habit.53

This is not just the old rhetoric of thrilling adventure, glamour, romance and gallantry with which war is sold to the public and to ignorant recruits. It postulates a habit of war that is part of the psychological makeup of ‘every red-blooded human boy’ and, quoting Kipling, indeed ‘part of their blood’. It may be ethically indefensible but it is clearly represented as a national instinct that made the distinction between Teutonic bellicosity and English warrior souls almost impossible save for their different manner of conducting war. Christopher Lane places Saki’s ‘redemptive militarism’ in the context of similar arguments by proto-fascists such as D.H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound that were meant to counteract a perceived feminization of British culture. 50

 Summers, ‘Militarism in Britain’, p. 115.   Morris, The Scaremongers, p. 225. 52  H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines, ed. Dennis Butts, Oxford, 1989, p. 133. 53   Saki, ‘An Old Love’, Morning Post, 23 April 1915; cited in Byrne, The Unbearable Saki, pp. 256–7. 51

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It becomes a synecdoche for the dilemma of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century British imperialism, which still projected a fantasy of mastery in which the role of the soldier and the role of the dandy increasingly clashed.54 But redemptive militarism may also be a symptom of a more long-standing imperialist anxiety that troubles a range of classic late nineteenth-century colonial narratives from Rider Haggard and Kipling to Conrad and Childers, and which resurfaces with particular urgency in the antebellum period: has Britannia still got men who are man enough to rule, let alone defend, her Empire? Time and again colonial narratives need to define Englishness as a specifically British imperial heroism and this definition always requires the construct of a weaker alterity: subject races or inferior masculinity. It also needs to steer clear of the memory, present in Ford and Conrad’s work, of earlier colonial practice that relied on exporting to the colonies those delinquent or superfluous elements of English society with neither a ‘clean combative strand in their blood’ nor ‘a natural turn for adventure’. For popular novelists like Le Queux, who would swiftly take his plots where public taste and prejudice would make them most profitable, the ‘other’ was first home-grown English complacency, vote-mongery and pacifism before the enemy came to be embodied as the German spy. Saki’s critique and scepticism goes much deeper and is most aptly demonstrated in the way in which he abandons his hero, weak in spirit as well as body, neither a proper dandy nor a decent warrior, to the fate of a subject race. In invasion fiction – the most symptomatic narrative of national anxiety – the enemy is often not the modern foreign invader but the legacy of empire and affluence that manifests itself in degeneration and complacency. Saki dismantles the Empire because it has lost its legitimacy with the loss of the racial, moral and physical superiority of the English. Yet these legitimizing fictions are difficult to revise. Ford’s The Good Soldier is a testament to their persistence and to the peculiarly pathological contortions they demand in order to be kept alive, particularly under the curative influence of the German spa.

54   Christopher Lane, The Ruling Passion: British Colonial Allegory and the Paradox of Homosexual Desire, Durham, 1995, pp. 227, 223. For Saki’s biographer A.J. Langguth, Saki’s advocacy of militarism is an overcompensation of his repressed homosexuality, which he tended to dismiss as youthful decadence and fin de siècle degeneration, and much of his enthusiasm for the First World War might be seen as a quest for ‘true’ masculinity unimpaired by physical or ‘moral’ weakness; Saki: The Life of Hector Hugh Munro, London, 1981, p. 230.

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Chapter 4

Ford’s ‘Tricky German Fashion’ Medical Modernity and Anglo-Saxon Pathology When, from 1903 to 1906, Ford Madox Ford struggled with illness so disconcerting it required continental treatment, he ventured to the spas of Germany. Alongside undergoing the many ‘nerve cures’ recommended for an impressive diagnostic register, he also researched a short monograph on Hans Holbein the Younger. Its composition, according to Ford’s reminiscences in Return to Yesterday, apparently alleviated his problems to a much greater degree than the ‘wickedly unskilful doctoring’ to which he was voluntarily subjecting himself. Holbein’s career took him to London, where he painted his famous oils of the ambassadors, the German merchant Georg Gisze and the court of Henry VIII. In the Holbein monograph, Ford commented repeatedly on the ugliness of Holbein’s English sitters and his irregular, adulterous lifestyle about which so little was known. Like Ford himself, the painter negotiated two cultures and represented individuals whose lives reflected similar vicissitudes – the German merchants, Anna of Cleve and his own wife. To reveal the ‘underlying truths’ of his sitters, to strip them of costume and pose and capture their alienation as a hallmark of individuality made him, for Ford, the first of the ‘modern painters’. This alienated modernity is later qualified not as an immediate characteristic of the rendition, a sincere opaqueness of style, but as a hallmark of the modern era: He has left us a picture of his world, as it were, upon a grey day. Other artists have given us more light and more shadow or more shadow alone. But no other artist has left a more sincere rendering of his particular world, and no other artist’s particular world is compact [composed] of simulacra more convincing, more illusory, more calculated to hold our attentions. He has redeemed a whole era for us from oblivion, and he has forced us to believe that his vision of it was the only feasible one.

  Ford Madox Ford, Return to Yesterday, ed. Bill Hutchings, Manchester, 1999, p.



202.

  Ford Madox Hueffer, Hans Holbein the Younger, London, 1905, pp. 159–60.  Ibid., p. 173.

 

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Figure 4.1 Hans Holbein the Younger, Der Kaufmann Georg Gisze (1532), Nationalgalerie, Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz Berlin, (Bpk, Gemäldegalerie SMB, Jörg P. Anders) This interpretation of Holbein as a painter of convincing and illusory simulacra anticipates much of Ford’s technique for his later novel The Good Soldier and its vision of an era. Holbein’s painting of Georg Gisze (Fig. 4.1), the German merchant of the London steel yard, renders the sitter through the accumulation of professional paraphernalia and symbolic items whose meaning now remains obscure. As in Ford’s novel, representational conventions and material world stand in for ‘character’: Holbein’s ‘merchant’ is Ford’s ‘gentleman’. The objects with which

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the merchant surrounds himself in his professional capacity (letters, seals, ledgers, writing tools, keys, coins), Gisze returning our gaze slightly askance and in a pose still focused on his business, as if we had just walked through the door and interrupted him – these vulgar signifiers of wealth and status reference a modern world dedicated to materialism, international trade and power, but they leave the person at its centre strangely inscrutable. We know how Georg Gisze earns his living, but we cannot know who he is: his face is perfectly expressionless. As a result, the accoutrements of his trade are instantly rendered vacuous, and the portrait becomes ‘a picture without meaning’, which is also the baffled conclusion of Ford’s narrator, John Dowell, at the close of his strange narrative, in all its artifice calculated to hold our attention. Nothing is just what it seems and yet its appearance is also all that is knowable: ‘No smoking-room will ever be other than peopled with incalculable simulacra amidst smoke wreaths. Yet […] what should I know if I don’t know the life of the hearth and of the smoking room, since my whole life has been passed in those places?’ (12) he asks. Everything, from entrées in hotel dining rooms to social categories, from national character to physical conditions, is a seemingly realistic ‘rendering’ that invites an interpretation. Yet in the discursive construction of Dowell’s character, these simulacra are not simply smokescreens for the pursuit of social status or adultery, they become a reality that cannot be divorced from the way in which it is rendered. When Dowell admits to the difficulties of rendering his sad tale (it is ‘so difficult to keep these people going’, to make the story ‘seem real’; 142, 120), we need to read these references as evidence of the collapse of simulacrum (character, signifier, story) and signified (people, experience, life) that makes discourse so indeterminate. This world exists by dint of its simulacra, and the ineluctable confluence of simulacrum and ‘reality’ is perhaps what makes The Good Soldier, like Holbein’s portraits, so modern; it collapses the phenomenological and the epistemological rather than highlights the ironic gap between them. Dowell’s bewilderment can certainly be read as ‘the fictionalized expressions of the discomfort with modernity’, in which case Ford’s novel would pursue a similar agenda to say, H.G. Wells’s Tono-Bungay (1909), a novel about the    Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier, ed. Martin Stannard, New York, 1995, p. 161. All subsequent references to this edition are cited parenthetically in the text.   Recent critics have argued that the novel repeatedly points out the divergence of appearances and reality, social convention and passion. See Andrzej Gasiorek, ‘Ford Madox Ford’s Modernism and the Question of Tradition’, English Literature in Transition, 44/1 (2001): 3–27, at p. 17–18. Sarah Henstra, ‘Ford and the Costs of Englishness: “Good Soldiering” as Performative Practice’, Studies in the Novel, 39/2 (2007): 177–95, at p. 178.    Jeffrey Mathes McCarthy, ‘The Good Soldier and the War for British Modernism’, Modern Fiction Studies 45/2 (1999): 301–39, at p. 320. McCarthy sees Ford’s technique as informed by a conflictual modernism, by warring factions in the search for modernist aesthetics (Rebel Artists versus Bloomsbury).

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commercial value of simulacra as ‘the one reality of human life – illusion’. What interests me about Ford’s rendition of and discomfort with modernity is that it is articulated through subjects who find themselves geographically dislocated in Germany and erotically displaced outside their home countries, in a medicalized environment that repackaged this modern pathology as a cure. The foreignness of Ford’s modernity did not go unnoticed by contemporary reviewers, some of whom criticized the novel’s apparent lack of correspondence to national social reality. The Outlook argued patriotically that despite ‘the cunning of its intricate workmanship’, this was ‘not a true story’. The characters were truer to ‘a quintet of déclassé cosmopolitans’ but held an ‘essential incongruity’ to the social class they were meant to portray. Such an improper tale could surely never involve ‘what in England it is the custom to call “quite good people”’ (10), as Dowell famously introduces the Ashburnhams very early on, echoing Turgenev’s strategy in Smoke, whose plot also revolves around ‘“the best and most fashionable people”’. The quotation marks are very important. They reduce a recognizable social category to a discursive construction, a simulacrum, and conflate signifier and signified. We therefore need to read Ford’s rendition of the spa in the tradition of the European novel and its ironic glance at this locale as a trope for social misreading, a natural habitat of social simulacra and perhaps as a synecdoche for the social opacity of modern life in order to understand fully the naivety of these quotation marks. I want to suggest that it is the foreignness of The Good Soldier which radically destabilizes social values and moral outlooks traditionally associated with Englishness; its ‘tricky German fashion’ (27) which, in 1915, was certainly not without risk. Part of Ford’s ‘cunning’ workmanship (he was then of course still called Hueffer) was to select such a ‘tricky’ locale – tricky in its focus on sociopathology and opaque in its clientele. Nauheim was then a provincial but popular Hessian spa of about 5,000 inhabitants in the Taunus mountains and catered for heart patients, specifically those affected by the excesses of modern living: alcohol, smoking, overwork, syphilis, neurasthenia, gout, obesity. During the first decade of the twentieth century it underwent major reconstruction that transformed its appearance from a quaint, half-timbered provincial spa into one of the most lavishly decorated art nouveau medical centres: Nauheim proclaimed its commitment to modernity not just in its scientific treatment but also in its architecture.10 In The Good Soldier, the famous ‘Nauheim treatment’ becomes a central metaphor for the way in which all the characters’ identities unravel when

 H.G. Wells, Tono-Bungay, ed. Patrick Parrinder, Harmondsworth, 2005, p. 221.   The Outlook, 17 April 1915, pp. 507–8, repr. in Stannard’s Norton edition of The Good Soldier on pp. 226–7.   Ivan Turgenev, Smoke, trans. Natalie Duddington, London, 1949, p. 5. 10  This transformation is well documented and historic photos can be viewed in the HADIS online data collection of the Hessisches Staatsarchiv, Darmstadt. (http://www. staatsarchiv-darmstadt.hessen.de/; http://www.hadis.hessen.de). 



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under the corrosive influence of a Gesamtarmentarium11 consisting of social misreadings, adulterous sexuality and the dislocations of medically-induced travel. As we shall see, one cannot simply add the spa to such medical institutions as hospitals and asylums that feature so prominently as sites of disciplinary corporeal regimes in Foucauldian analyses of discourses of power.12 The spa is a profoundly equivocal locus in the European cultural and literary landscape: it appears socially exclusive but is open to anyone who has sufficient money; it seems to encourage social intercourse between different strata of society but actually enforces social discrimination; it purports to alleviate specific illnesses under strict institutional surveillance while its liberal climate encourages social and sexual transgression. As a locale it presents a world ‘compact of simulacra more convincing, more illusory, more calculated’ than any Edwardian drawing room. The spa is the simulacrum for a story about simulacra. In its opacity – its greyness – it is positively disorientating. Just as Holbein, a German immigrant, required the ostentatious objects surrounding his sitters to make us see the underlying truth of their vacuity, Ford required the ‘tricky’ German setting (its melodrama, its vulgarity, its modernity, its deceptions) to convince us of his vision of pathological Anglo-Saxons. Convincing Simulacra? The Socioeconomic Opacity of the German Spa In nineteenth-century literary tradition, the spa features as an important if ambivalent locus for social signification; indeed it becomes a trope for social misreading. In Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Catherine Morland’s time in Bath is part of her apprenticeship in distinguishing between what people are and what they claim to be. Dickens presented a much more caustic portrait of the spa as a sociosexual marketplace in Dombey and Son, in which the cosmetically enhanced Mrs Skewton virtually sells her daughter Edith Granger to the emotionally crippled Dombey at Leamington. Yet by the mid-century the days of the British spas were numbered: when, in the final chapter of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Becky Sharp ‘chiefly hangs about Bath and Cheltenham, where a very strong party of excellent people consider her a most injured woman’, this is an indication of her social marginalization.13 For Thackeray’s ‘excellent people’ read: the easily duped, the socially illiterate or naive. Spa towns attracted a mixed range of temporary and semi-permanent residents during their season; there were the fashionable and affluent and those earnestly hoping to benefit from the curative effects of mineral springs, but this upmarket clientele mingled with a train of financially   Gesamtarmentarium denotes the entirety of medical and paramedical procedures and strategies (diagnostic techniques, operations, tools, medication) marshalled in the treatment of a single condition. 12  See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: ‘The Will to Knowledge’; vol. 3: ‘The Care of the Self’, trans. Robert Hurley, London, 1998. 13   William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair, London, 1991, p. 877. 11

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straitened guests who relied on the greater affordability of a respectable lifestyle in provincial towns. And finally there were the roguish déclassé elements that hoped, by more or less fraudulent means, to eke out a living before the excellent people they depended on broke off their connection. The less respectable and the more impecunious they were, the greater the likelihood that they would drift from the English provinces across the Channel: ‘There is no town in Europe but has its little colony of English raffs’, comments Thackeray’s narrator while outlining Becky Sharp’s social demise as a European itinerary.14 ‘Europe’, and in particular the German spa, initially became a playground for entirely opposite social classes: the wealthy European aristocracy and haute bourgeoisie15 – ‘what in England it is the custom to call “quite good people”’ – as well as those foreign visitors who in their own country no longer belonged to this category but contributed to the debauched air of the locale. Thackeray’s colourful image of Baden in The Newcomes suggests that semi-fraudulent characters such as Countess Calypso, Captain Blackball and Marquis Iago were just as much part of the foreign attraction as the waters themselves. The continental spa was a curiously democratic place in which different social strata existed in close proximity and even mixed in a way that would not otherwise have been possible: let us think of the way George Eliot describes the crowd around the roulette table in Leubronn (a fictionalized Homburg) in the glorious opening chapter of Daniel Deronda, in which the pearly wrists of duchesses lie alongside the crab-like hands of impoverished withered hags, both watching the ‘showy’ expenditure of ‘a respectable London tradesman […]. Here certainly was a striking admission of human equality’.16 Turgenev makes a similar comment about ‘new money’ in Smoke, where a well-dressed Russian landowner presumably aspires to mix with ‘the fine fleur of our society’ but betrays his new status by his ignorance of roulette.17 The passion for gambling acted as a social leveller, but staying in a spa as the tradesman and the Russian landowner do testified to modern social mobility in an industrial consumer society, to the aspiration of the middle classes to be part of the fashionable set through conspicuous waste. In the early twentieth century, Edward VII embodied this modern fusion of social convention with conspicuous 14

 Ibid., p. 822.  In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – the heyday of the continental watering places – an extended spa holiday remained the privilege of the moneyed classes since the working classes did not have sufficient holidays to make such an extended stay possible let alone affordable, and even the professional middle classes of teachers, merchants and tradesmen, lawyers and doctors often could not take more than a fortnight to three weeks off. Hence the popularity of organized tours such as Cook’s that enabled the maximum of sights within such time spans with the minimum of organizational effort for the traveller. See Lynne Whitey, Grand Tours and Cook’s Tours: A History of Leisure Travel, 1750 to 1915, London, 1998, Ch. 5 passim. 16  George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, ed. Terence Cave, Harmondsworth, 1995, p. 8. 17  Turgenev, Smoke, pp. 5–6. 15

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consumption through his social circle and through the way in which he made the pursuit of pleasure respectable.18 Even if facilities such as casinos, tennis courts and theatres or events such as horse races and polo matches indicated that spas were increasingly leisure centres for the wealthy rather than health-based venues for the enfeebled, taking the waters at Marienbad, Ems or Wiesbaden indirectly reflected affluence: one was in the company of illustrious royalty, and many of the mineral springs claimed to alleviate the physical consequences of the Edwardian palate, like chronic dyspepsia, gout or ‘excessive obesity’.19 However, to think of the continental spa only as the cosmopolitan haunt of an international elite would ignore the social complexity of this medico-cultural locus, which makes it such an opaque site in early twentieth-century literature and culture. After the newly formed German government prohibited gambling throughout Germany in 1872 and those intent on roulette and baccarat moved on to Monte Carlo, German spas reinvested heavily in new pump houses and bathing facilities to promote their redefined identity as modern medical centres. (This accounts for the prevalence of Gründerzeit and Jugendstil architecture in contrast to the Regency facades of English spas such as Cheltenham, Leamington or Bath.) This process of re-medicalization opened up the spa more widely to the aspiring middle classes, not least because local authorities had to replace the lost income from the gaming tables through a larger contingent of paying visitors. At the same time, the cost of staying at a spa became more and more affordable. This meant that, from the late nineteenth century onwards, spas became more socially diverse places. Guidebooks and conduct manuals – two genres indicative of the cultural aspirations and the social anxieties of the middle classes – bear out this social shift. In the fin de siècle, conduct manuals began to advise their readers in dedicated chapters about suitable conduct in drinking halls, appropriate wear at smaller spa towns as opposed to large, fashionable spas, and how single women might brave the social dangers and medical challenges of a cure. Baedeker, the German company that catered so successfully to the cultural aspirations and socioeconomic needs of the newly travelling middle classes that by 1900 it produced the most successful guidebook,20 also offered authoritative advice on the attractions of the spas. Its small-print comments in the entry on Baden-Baden, still one of the most popular, international and exclusive watering places in Europe, in its most popular edition The Rhine (1903) suggested how some of the spa’s glamour might be shared by a less ostentatious clientele:

 See Ronald Pearsall, Edwardian Life and Leisure, Newton Abbot, 1973, p. 20.   See ibid., p. 75–6; see also Karl Baedeker, The Rhine, from Rotterdam to Constance: Handbook for Travellers, 15th rev. edn, Leipzig, 1903, p. 149. 20   See Jan Palmowski, ‘Travels with Baedeker: The Guidebook and the Middle Classes in Victorian and Edwardian England’, in Rudy Koshar (ed.), Histories of Leisure, Oxford, 2002, pp. 105–31, at p. 120. 18

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Evidently wishing to avoid the exclusivity of ‘pretending hotels’ for reasons of taste if not economics, the middle classes certainly benefited from the sensible services of Baedeker, which made them more efficient consumers and allowed them to ‘manage and resist the spread of commercial relations within tourism’:22 reliable information was one way of combating ontological and economic anxiety about the foreign. Baedeker accurately listed everything from visitors’ tax23 to the cost of pension (board and lodging) and the price of carriage hire for regional excursions; from the speed of regional railways to the prestige and services of local accommodation. As Burkhard Fuhs argues, because Baedeker broke up the costs of a spa holiday in such detail, this service made it possible for those with reasonable but not unlimited means to calculate the affordability of such a holiday.24 However, precisely because of the performativity of social status, exhibiting distinction became very important to maintain one’s own sense of exclusivity against someone else’s vulgar notion of entitlement in a socially mixed environment. Spa institutions and hotels were quick to capitalize on the status of their clientele, while local spa authorities published in Cur-Listen and Badezeitungen (spa newspapers) the titles, ranks and professions of new arrivals, who had to enter their name in police reports or hotel registers. These became a veritable Who’s Who for the German spa 21   Baedeker, The Rhine, p. 365. Baedeker gives the currency rate for 1903 as 1s = 1M and £1 = 20M. Fuhs suggests that the average daily spend on a spa holiday c.1910 would have been 10M (10 shillings), provided one avoided the luxury spas; Burkhard Fuhs, Mondäne Orte einer vornehmen Gesellschaft: Kultur und Geschichte der Kurstädte, 1700– 1900, Hildesheim, 1992. 22   Rudy Koshar, ‘“What ought to be seen”: Tourists’ Guidebooks and National Identity in Modern Germany and Europe’, Journal of Contemporary History, 33/3 (1998): 323–40, at p. 330. 23   Part of the ‘privilege’ of visiting a German spa was to pay a local visitors’ tax for the upkeep of the facilities, which amounted to a considerable sum and depended on the popularity of the town and the number of its springs and services. Note that the sycophantic Bagshaw, who discloses Florence’s premarital adventures to Dowell, seeks ways to evade it (71). The figures in Baedeker’s 1903 Rhine serve to compare the tax for a couple with the cost of pension (board and lodging) in a first-class establishment: Soden 20M vs. 6.5M; Ems 27M vs. 8–10M; Nauheim 18M vs. 6–15M; Homburg 30M vs. 9+M; Baden 30M vs. 9–14M; Wiesbaden 20M vs. 10–16M. 24   Fuhs, Mondäne Orte, p. 357.

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season. In The Good Soldier, both Dowell and Leonora use this information to orientate themselves socially. This social reading process is dramatized in one of the early scenes of the novel, in the dining room of the Hotel Excelsior where the couples first meet. Leonora’s choice of table produces an awkward exchange with the headwaiter since it is a table reserved for the Guggenheimers of Chicago who are troublesome guests and stingy tippers – signs of their social inferiority as aspiring middle-class Jews.25 Her assertion of social status by both literally displacing other guests and associating herself with ‘nice people’ like the Dowells is of course highly ironic in the light of the subsequent plot. Despite the carefully stage-managed social categorization, Edward’s ‘measuring look’ and Leonora’s ‘taking in the qualities of a horse’ cannot ultimately prevent social misreadings or sexual improprieties (28, 29). In this peculiarly concentrated, mixed society, in which the daily rituals of balneo-therapeutic treatments, promenades, table d’hôte, Kurkonzert and excursions encouraged frequent social intercourse, it was not always easy to distinguish between ‘good people’ and those who merely aspired to be thought of as good people. It is for this reason that contemporary conduct manuals often urged caution when it came to striking up acquaintance with strangers: the spa was a lively market for marriage swindlers and social frauds, and tacitly an equally lively market for prostitution and adultery.26 In The Desirable Alien (1913), Ford’s lover Violet Hunt, who accompanied him to Nauheim in 1910, noted about the German spa not just ‘the dreadful water that tastes and smells like rotten eggs’ but also, taking her cue from Thackeray, ‘that vague aroma of dévergondage, that intimate flavour of impropriety, of possible scabrous adventure’. Shady people were part of the setting in which sinister-looking men turned out to be respectable English stockbrokers, and husbands of respectable Englishwomen were silently thrilled about touching hems with (‘it was fondly hoped’) the skirts of professional beauties and unmentionable ladies.27 There is a sense that social misreading is part of the dislocation of foreign travel, particularly at continental spas, where both host’s and guest’s reputations 25

  For an analysis of anti-Semitism in German and international spas see Frank Bajohr, ‘Unser Hotel ist “judenfrei”’: Bäder-Antisemitismus im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, Frankfurt/Main, 2nd edn, 2003, particularly pp. 21–37 and 142–54. 26  See for example Oswald Marschner, Takt und Ton, Berlin, 1907, pp. 222–3. On the later point see Fuhs, Mondäne Orte, pp. 232–47. In Fontane’s scandalous Irrungen, Wirrungen (‘Delusions, Confusions’) the hero is told of a ‘Russian’ lady, allegedly at Schlangenbad for a cure while really ‘making out’ on the more illustrious and affluent promenade in Wiesbaden. Theodor Fontane, Irrungen, Wirrungen, Frankfurt/Main, 1984, pp. 208ff. Felix Krull, Thomas Mann’s ‘confidence man’ in his eponymous novel set in the pre-war years, realizes that the outward signs, the carefree habitus of affluence and breeding can be learnt: subsequently he makes a career out of passing himself off as the rich Marquis de Venosta; Thomas Mann, Bekentnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull, Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag, 1986, p. 174. 27   Violet Hunt and Ford Madox Hueffer, The Desirable Alien, London, 1913, pp. 41, 96–7.

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are dependent to a certain extent on the visibility (or the display) of social status. The cosmopolitan setting of the spa also encourages the assumption that certain social strata shared supranational signifiers of status and affluence. In Dostoevsky’s The Gambler (1867), in which he fictionalized his experience in Wiesbaden (the novel’s ‘Roulettenburg’), the leitmotif of gambling extends to the socioeconomic assessments to which all characters subject each other. Nobody is as important or aristocratic as they appear and, more importantly, no one has as much money as they claim, but the narrator makes clear that the local spa industry has vested interests in colluding in (and gambling on the profitability of) acts of social misrecognition: At spas – and, I think, all over Europe – hotel-keepers and managers, when they assign rooms to guests, are guided not so much by the guests’ demands and wishes as by their own personal view of them; and it must be observed that they rarely make mistakes. […] I don’t know what they all took Grandmamma for, but it was apparently for an extremely important and, what mattered most, extremely rich personage. They immediately entered in the register: Madame la générale princesse de Tarassévitchéva, although Grandmamma had never been a princess. Her servants, her special railway-carriage, and the enormous numbers of unnecessary port-manteaux, suit-cases and even trunks which had arrived with her, were probably the first causes of her prestige; and her chair, her sharp tone and harsh voice, her eccentric questions, delivered in a most uninhibited fashion and tolerating no objections, in short the whole figure Grandmamma cut – erect, harsh and imperious – completed the awe in which she was held.28

Palpably the hotel management’s ‘personal view’ of Grandmamma expresses a desire for her to be a princess because it supports the hotel’s reputation as ‘the best, the most expensive and aristocratic in the resort’, whose corridors are populated by ‘magnificent ladies and important-looking Englishmen’.29 Important-looking are the key words here.30 Dostoyevsky’s novel reverberates strongly in the early chapters of The Good Soldier with its index of sociocultural signifiers that are soon revealed to be deceptive, constructed, stage-managed behind a facade of reticence: the ideal of the gentleman, the cultural construct of Englishness, the appearance of respectability inscribed in the conventions of continental travel. Grandmamma’s 28   Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Gambler/Bobok/A Nasty Story, trans. Jessie Coulson, Harmondsworth, 1966, pp. 81–2. 29  Ibid., pp. 74–5. 30  Russians were frequent visitors to German spas. Baden-Baden in particular had a large and wealthy Russian clientele that enriched the suburbs with extensive villas, custombuilt for annual residence in the spa. Dostoyevsky was not the only Russian who diagnosed the interplay between the desire for status and the ambiguity of social signifiers. Gogol visited, as did Chekhov who died in Badenweiler in 1904. Turgenev’s late novel Smoke (1867) was written and is set in Baden-Baden.

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accoutrements are condensed into ‘the profusion of his cases, all of pigskin and stamped with his initials’ (24) that Edward had been given by Leonora as a sign of their financial recovery. Leonora’s demeanour of social authority, adopted for securing a good table in the dining room, ‘tolerating no objections’, produces similar assumptions of social status (and solvency) to those that Grandmamma’s attitude establishes in Dostoevsky’s narrative. The Ashburnhams’ demeanour that so impresses itself on Dowell supposedly crowns their return to social visibility and financial solvency after Edward’s ruinous escapade with La Dolciquita and their economizing exile in India. Yet one of the major unspoken attractions of German spas was that they conferred the air of conspicuous consumption while in reality the cost of living there, even if for considerable time throughout the high season, was still lower than a comparable standard of living at home. Baedeker’s breakdowns of costs are one indication of affordability as are the general comments that Germany is a cheaper destination than most other European countries.31 They would lie well below Hans Castorp’s pre-war weekly bill at his sanatorium in fashionable Davos in The Magic Mountain (1924). Even with luxurious expenditure, he only needs twothirds of his annual income.32 Thus spa holidays appeared luxurious when they might actually cloak, as in the Ashburnhams’ case, the habit of thrift.33 Leonora’s strategy of maintaining appearances in spite of straitened circumstances continues in the careful negotiation of expenses versus status: while staying at a relatively modest hotel, they dine at the more upmarket Excelsior. The novel is very specific about social and financial signifiers to underline the cost of status (annual income, money lost at gaming tables, sums invested in shares, expenses incurred by and curbed for tenants and mess subscriptions). It elaborates on sensible middle-class ways to reduce expenditure without risking the vulgarity of the middle classes: alternating newspaper subscriptions; shared dinners for the Grand Duke of Nassau Schwerin; the Burlington arcade for blue ties. The spa is a modern nexus of exchange: modern treatments for old illnesses; modern ‘conditions’ rather than laborious deceptions; modern economizing instead of class-conscious expenditure; modern sharing in lieu of old-fashioned adultery. Modern life, the novel suggests, exceeds traditional moral, social or economic categories, but this phenomenology is precisely the reason why we can no longer orient ourselves in reality.   See Karl Baedeker, Northern Germany: Handbook for Travellers, 15th rev. edn, Leipzig, 1913, p. xi. Baedeker’s Rhine (1903), p. xiii. 32  Thomas Mann, Der Zauberberg, Frankfurt/Main, 1991, pp. 222ff. Fuhs calculates an average monthly spend of about 300M for a middle-class guest at a spa; Mondäne Orte, pp. 369–72. Castorp’s monthly expenditure seems just under a more generous, all-inclusive 800M at Davos. 33   With an annual income of £15,000 the Dowells are rich. The Ashburhams may have assets and land, but these bring only an annual income of £3,000–£5,000. This makes them comfortably off but when income falls they cannot maintain their standard of living in their chosen social stratum. 31

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‘A Wanderer upon the Face of Public Resorts’: Travel and the Dislocation of Identity English visitors tended to frequent spas catering to an international clientele: Baden-Baden, Homburg, or Nauheim if they really were ill.34 The latter attracted a fair share of English visitors – between 1,200 in 1903 and 885 in 191335 – ‘good’ enough to form an English colony, merit the building of an ‘English’ Church and police itself through the ‘nodding gossips of the Kursaal terrace’ (41).36 Baedeker too made a special note if a location was popular with the English, presumably to deter the more adventurous or alleviate the destabilizing feeling of otherness. E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View portrays troublesome British tourists who clutch their Baedeker as if it were some charm against the perils of cultural difference, promising to make alterity readable and reassuring the sightseer of aesthetic norms that can be consumed like any other commodity. Both the British and the Americans had a reputation for being difficult visitors, linguistically lazy and poorly adaptable, inconvenienced and irritated by the foreignness of foreign places and traditionally encouraged in their prejudice by the cultural arrogance of the early Murray guides.37 These attitudes were satirized by Mark Twain in Tramps Abroad (1880) in which he wrote about his stay in Baden-Baden. Precisely when the English-speaking visitor was at his or her most exposed, in a state of smug superiority or vulnerable undress, German shopkeepers and stern bathing attendants retaliated with well-calculated rudeness that belied international rules of politeness. There are plenty such moments of exposure to embarrassment in The Good Soldier, but they are not meted out by the local population. The spa is not an ordinary foreign locus; it is less a chosen destination than an inflicted one. It avoids social scandal at home, establishes a fixed extramarital rendezvous in the social calendar and annually confirms physical delicacy as a sign of refinement. With spring spent in Paris, July to September in Nauheim and winter in the 34

 Homburg, southeast of the Taunus mountains, was perhaps the most popular watering place with English visitors: Baedeker’s Rhine (p. 242) notes that one third of its annual 12,000 visitors were English, who during the short season could enjoy lawn tennis, daily services at the English Church or Presbyterian services in the Schlosskirche. Wiesbaden attracted about 130,000 visitors annually; Baden-Baden received about 60,000 (four times its population), most of them crowding into town in the short season proper during the summer months. 35  According to the town archive of Nauheim, overall visitor numbers increased by 50 per cent in the pre-war boom years, from c. 24,000 in 1903 to 35,000 in 1913. While English visitors made up one of the strongest foreign contingents (only exceeded by US citizens and Russians) their overall number declined in the pre-war years. I am indebted to Brigitte Fraatz of the Nauheim Museum for this information. 36  See also the manuscript variation that expands on the rituals of social selection which exclude ‘new money’. Ford, The Good Soldier, p. 199, fourth entry for p. 31. 37   See Palmowski, ‘Travels with Baedeker’, p. 120.

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south of France or the Riviera, the Dowells’ annual itinerary looks like that of a cosmopolitan social elite, but it reduces them to prisoners on the continent. They are mere sightseers, despite their semi-resident status in some of these places. Indeed, one way for Dowell to denigrate his wife is to describe her as a tourist, someone who, with the help of Baedeker, ‘got all she wanted out of one look at a place. She had the seeing eye’ (16). Unlike Dowell – unreliable, obtuse, unseeing – all the other characters have some optical grasp of their environment: Florence assesses places and men, Edward women, Leonora money and status. Yet while Florence ‘takes in’ at a glance and ‘consumes’, Dowell sees the world ‘like spots of colour on an immense canvas’ (17), something that perennially evades meaning-making strategies let alone consumption. There is no doubt that this nomadic life unsettles him; there is too much space to traverse for the eye and the feet. Nauheim, this small provincial locale catering to the flabby-hearted, presents a real challenge to his identity: I don’t know how it feels to be a patient at one of those places. I never was a patient anywhere. I daresay the patients get a home feeling and some sort of anchorage in the spot. They seem to like the bathing attendants, with their cheerful faces, their air of authority, their white linen. But, for myself, to be at Nauheim gave me a sense – what shall I say? – a sense almost of nakedness – the nakedness that one feels on the sea-shore or in any great open space. I had no attachments, no accumulations. […] And one is too polished up. Heaven knows I was never an untidy man. But the feeling that I had when, whilst poor Florence was taking her morning bath, I stood upon the carefully swept steps of the Englischer Hof, looking at the carefully arranged trees in tubs upon the carefully arranged gravel whilst carefully arranged people walked past in carefully calculated gaiety, at the carefully calculated hour, the tall trees of the public gardens, going up to the right; the reddish stone of the baths – or were they white half-timber châlets? Upon my word, I have forgotten, I who was there so often. That will give you the measure of how much I was in the landscape. (21–2)

This passage is perhaps the clearest articulation of Dowell’s utter dislocation. In spite of being a sedulous nurse and despite his uxorial vicarious suffering, he does not fit smoothly into the category of ‘patient’ that would give him a raison d’être in the place; Nauheim has taken over his role. Dowell’s ‘nakedness’ is a profound isolation. Characteristically for the dualism with which Ford endows his narrator, he calls himself ‘a wanderer upon the face of public resorts’ (21) and yet he is as much ‘in the landscape’ as all the sights he enumerates instead of naming the feeling he has. Indeed what he sees – Nauheim in the morning – is how he feels: ‘too polished up’, in a routine that desensitizes him to the full meaning of his surroundings. Here Ford presents in a nutshell the artifice of social identities that Henry James had already revealed as brittle facades and which, in the Edwardian era, seem all the more conspicuously constructed and ‘carefully arranged’. Dowell will reveal more and more details about what else is subject to careful arrangements,

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from Ashburnham’s padded suits to Florence’s half-digested, garbled historical glosses from Baedeker, to Leonora’s accountancy. The problem for Dowell is to realize that the arrangement of spa routine and the artifice of his marriage (and that of the Ashburnhams) are identical – that is why the spa is such an appropriate environment for their meeting. Dowell finally concludes his sentence about how he feels two pages later, standing on the hotel steps: Natty, precise, well-brushed, conscious of being rather small amongst the long English, the lank Americans, the rotund Germans, and the obese Russian Jewesses, I should stand there, tapping a cigarette on the outside of my case, surveying for a moment the world in the sunlight. But a day was to come when I was never to do it again alone. (23)

Unsurprisingly, this is just as ambiguous a statement as the one he initially left unfinished. Not a patient (and therefore not vicariously at home in a curative establishment), he is also not a stereotypical foreigner and therefore not recognizable through corporeally defined national signifiers. Yet thus out of shape – neither ‘long’ nor ‘lank’, neither ‘rotund’ nor ‘obese’ – he still is sufficiently well-brushed to fit into the carefully arranged landscape, indeed his inadequacy (like Lord Jim’s) seems to entitle him to an attitude of spurious mastery over it that the narrative nonetheless belies: ‘you never get an inch deeper than the things I have catalogued’ (32). Cataloguing and surveying are the optical-analytical means that ordinarily reduce the world to taxonomy, and that is precisely what Dowell finds: the world-as-taxonomy, the picture without a meaning, the positivist simulacrum replacing social reality. Here we should remember the way in which the Ashburnhams habitually enter, survey, dispossess and appropriate to reassure themselves of the worthiness of their existence. The quartet becomes ‘carefully arranged people walk[ing] past in carefully calculated gaiety, at the carefully calculated hour’. They are all ‘in the landscape’: Supposing that you should come upon us, sitting together at one of the little tables in front of the club house, let us say at Homburg, taking tea of an afternoon and watching the miniature golf, you would have said that, as human affairs go we were an extraordinary safe castle. […] our intimacy was like a minuet, simply because on every possible occasion and in every possible circumstance we knew where to go, where to sit, which table we unanimously should choose; and we could rise and go, all four together, without a signal from any one of us, always to the music of the Kur orchestra, always in the temperate sunshine, or if rained, in discreet shelters. (11)

This passage wonderfully bears out the aspect of tranquil respectability that makes the spa such an attractive venue, but it also lists what produces this effect – a peculiar somnambulistic signification made up of social conventions, spa routine

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and ennui which Dowell mistakes for ‘intimacy’ and ‘class’. It is a critical cliché to read this tightly choreographed ‘minuet of the Hessian bathing-places’ as a dance to the music of time, Ford’s portrait of the pressures and socio-pathologies of the Edwardian era: the glamorous facade that cloaks a ‘prison full of screaming hysterics’ (12). What looked like a society portrait by Sargent turns out to be a nightmare by Munch. But could one not also read these phenomenological passages as symptomatic of the pathology of travelling where social routines help stifle the anxiety of being in foreign places? Later Dowell even calls travelling ‘harsh and masculine’ (84). If the years between the Franco-Prussian War and the Second World War are habitually called ‘the golden age of travel’, this epithet captures the nostalgia for travel as bourgeois conspicuous consumption before the vulgarities of mass tourism reduced going abroad to a common pastime. It ignores the hardships of travel, its complex arrangements and awkward logistics, its embarrassments and anxieties that any number of pigskin cases could not alleviate. Let us recall the passage in which Dowell complains at length about the discomforts of travelling, about poor connections between Belgian and French trains that force travellers into undignified haste (38–9). How else would we explain the swathe of European modernist fiction that dramatizes the dislocations – erotic, social and ontological – of travelling abroad: E.M. Forster’s Italian novels, Katherine Mansfield’s In a German Pension, Mann’s Death in Venice, Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out, Arthur Schnitzler’s Fräulein Else, Elizabeth Bowen’s The Hotel. The Good Soldier should be read in this tradition, which uses points of view composed of befuddlement and irony. In Nauheim, Dowell is habitually assaulted by a fear of vanishing through agoraphobia, relentless routine or social isolation (‘no attachments, no accumulations’). Even being ‘in the landscape’ is a form of disappearing. And yet this fear cloaks a much deeper anxiety. Dowell as the surveyor of curative rituals in Nauheim maps out the place until he apparently merges with a medicalized topography in which he begins to participate through the use of its facilities – Swedish exercises, lawn tennis, manicure. His uxorial subscription to a programme of social events and excursions increasingly makes us agree with Leonora’s diagnosis that it is he who is the invalid, strangely incapacitated, implausibly obtuse. Dowell’s well-known confession of counting his footsteps out of sheer boredom follows on from his ambivalent admission of alienation and over-familiarity: I could find my way blindfolded to the hot rooms, to the douche rooms, to the fountain in the centre of the quadrangle where the rusty water gushes out. Yes, I could find my way blindfolded. I know the exact distances. From the hotel Regina you took one hundred and eighty-seven paces, then, turning sharp, lefthanded, four hundred and twenty took you straight down to the fountain.

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From the Englischer Hof, starting on the sidewalk, it was ninety-seven paces and the same four hundred and twenty, but turning lefthanded this time. (22).38

The fountain in the centre of Nauheim’s art nouveau Sprudelhof is precisely where patients congregate and disappear behind the doors of the various bathhouses (Fig. 4.2).

Figure 4.2

Bad Nauheim Sprudelhof (c.1912)

Nauheim conflates the desiring and the ailing body, sex and death, but these preclude each other only in Dowell’s mind. Florence is ‘in the landscape’ in a different way, so familiar with its balneo-therapeutic rituals and social conventions that they can provide both the stage and the paravent for her sex life. Abroad at Nauheim, she is literally in her element, while her husband remains a foreign body who can only be assimilated by vicariously participating and thus disappearing in the socio-medical landscape. It is sex that Dowell cannot understand: he never gets the measure of his wife’s adulterous itinerary, constantly mistaking it as part of a medical regime. His own case, of course, is the best evidence for the way in 38

 The original manuscript version charted different territory. While the footsteps here appear to relate to Dowell’s own activities, the original version is much more focused around paths between Dowell and Florence. See Ford, The Good Soldier, p. 197, second entry for p. 22.

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which Nauheim fuses the two. The knowledge of Florence’s premarital sexual history paralyses him on the one occasion when he could rise to the occasion. Only when Florence’s now sexualized body is completely out of reach can Dowell enter her bedroom as ‘the titular possessor of the corpse’ (75). Dowell is a man who is both attracted to and repulsed by women who make themselves sexually unavailable to him and are involved with other men. The Good Soldier, then, is a carefully arranged confession of the masochistic and vicarious pleasures of sexual renunciation. Florence’s ‘heart’ assumes the status of a fetishistic object through which Dowell can ward off the threat of castration. Sex and Englishness: One of those Modern ‘Things’ For Dowell sex ‘is a thing […] that must be taken for granted’ (79). With respect to his wife, it is one of the ‘things’ to be avoided in a carefully arranged combination of reticence and abstinence. Yet ‘taking everything for granted’ is also a ‘modern English habit’ and the attitude that characterizes the couples’ relationship with each other (29; 31). The arrival of the Ashburnhams appears to alleviate his anxieties but when the medicinal pas de deux becomes an erotic quartet there is in effect no real difference between the steps in Nauheim and the tableau in Homburg, except that Homburg, with its aristocratic cachet and established English colony, suggests a slightly more ‘English’ minuet – not because of the taking of tea but because of the way in which Englishness is defined in the novel. While Dostoyevsky emphasized the excess of signification as underlining social status, the Ashburnhams rely on Dowell’s perception of a lack of signification as constructing typically English respectability. The ‘extraordinary want of any communicativeness’ and faces with ‘no expression of any kind whatever’ (159) become national, social and moral characteristics diametrically opposed to the loquacious vulgarity of Dowell’s American wife Florence and Dowell’s own rambling equivocations:39 [Edward’s] face hitherto had, in the wonderful English fashion, expressed nothing whatever. Nothing. There was in it neither joy nor despair; neither hope nor fear; neither boredom nor satisfaction. He seemed to perceive no soul in that crowded room; he might have been walking in a jungle. I never came across such a perfect expression before and never shall again. It was insolence and not insolence; it was modesty and not modesty. (24)

Insular and blank, Edward’s ‘perfect expression’ – perfect because indecipherable – invites projection. We might here recall Ford’s statement in The Soul of London, discussed in Chapter 2, on the effect the modern metropolis had on a German Junker, how it virtually washed the Prussian out of him, softened his backbone, 39  Sarah Henstra notes how the narrator constructs national identity through language; Henstra, ‘Ford and the Costs of Englishness’, p. 189.

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subdued his national signifiers into near invisibility. For Forster it was the want of feeling that was detrimental in English national character while in The Spirit of the People, Ford complained of the opposite: ‘the Englishman feels very deeply and reasons very little’ but above all remains extraordinarily reticent; all signification is controlled to the point of unreadability.40 Englishness literally becomes ‘Nothing’, and the English gentleman consequently an embodiment of this nothingness that can mean any number of things precisely because repression is elevated to a hallmark of national identity, class and manners. Is this perhaps the reason for the peculiar facial vacuity of Holbein’s immigrant sitters that focused Ford’s attention towards the simulacra of the material objects surrounding them – did they all strive to seem ‘English’? Dowell’s insistence that Edward is a gentleman, with all the connotations and values implied in such a statement, appears to contradict his behaviour. It is not just the Kilsyte case that suggests that ‘gentlemen’ had become an unstable category which, if read from a lower stratum or a more unorthodox point of view, could simply mean sexual predator or snob. For Christine Berberich, this deconstruction of a cornerstone of Englishness and English social tradition is the modernist element of the novel and one of the ways in which the Anglo-German Ford demonstrates his ambivalence about his own sense of belonging.41 Sarah Henstra very persuasively reads the novel as a tale of melancholia that ‘acts out the anxiety, regret, and longing within an Englishness that has seen its day’.42 This would place Ford somewhere between Conrad’s ambivalence about modern life and traditional heroic ideals in Lord Jim and H.G. Wells’s view of modernity as ‘a thing intruded or as a gloss upon this predominant formula’ of a rigid and readable class structure in Tono-Bungay (20). For Wells, class as a determining national structure is largely impervious to modernity while Conrad’s view is perhaps even more pessimistic and nostalgic since his mythical vision responds not to class but to imperialist ideology. Ford’s anxiety about the fate of the gentleman in modern times was certainly of its time.43 In contemporary discourses on educational reform, the value of the gentleman was also denigrated. As G.R. Searle has argued in The Quest for National Efficiency, ‘The notion that “character” was a substitute for knowledge or intelligence had to be demolished, along with the belief that an English “gentleman” brought up on sport and a smattering of the classics was a match for the

  Ford, England and the English, pp. 311–16.  See Christine Berberich, ‘A Modernist Elegy to the Gentleman? Englishness and the Idea of the Gentleman in Ford’s The Good Soldier’, in Denis Brown and Jenny Plastow (eds), Ford Madox Ford and Englishness, Amsterdam, 2006, pp. 195–211, at pp. 203–4. 42  Henstra, ‘Ford and the Cost of Englishness’, p. 193. 43   For a very instructive history of the social category and literary fate of the gentleman see Christine Berberich, The Image of the Gentleman in Twentieth-Century Literature, Aldershot, 2007. 40 41

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trained expert’.44 Since 1880 and particularly before the First World War, English ‘class society’ increasingly subscribed to the values and beliefs of a ‘professional social ideal’ that was changing socioeconomic structures and moral perspectives from within.45 It is important to note that the threat to the gentleman did not just come from the business and finance sector, whose leaders manifested qualities and skills on which empire and affluence rested just as much as on the myth of adventurers and frontiersmen. It was Germany again, whose increased industrial output was boosted by her advanced professionalization of skills and vocational training in the new polytechnics, and whose army had also demonstrated, since the surprising victory in the Franco-Prussian war, that the old chivalric values ruling conventional warfare had made way for a systematic, efficient and modern military machine. In Efficiency and Empire (1901) Arnold White argued that ‘the competition of Germany with England is the competition of an effective organism with a heterogeneous multitude of half-educated individuals’.46 By the turn of the century, the social category of the ‘gentleman’ started to look like a national liability: quaintly obsolete and disastrously inept in his traditional habitat, public service and the military. Lord Esher complained that the nation now needed a new type of soldier because it faced a new enemy: The laws of historical and ethnographic evolution […] require that we shall fight one of the most powerful military empires that has ever existed. […] I fear that proficiency in games, or in the hunting-field, will not help our poor lads much when they have to face the carefully trained and highly educated German officers. Our difficulty is that our lawyers and physicians are professional men, but until quite lately our soldiers have been amateurs – and soldiering a pastime and not a ‘business’.47

Here we have Ashburnham in a nutshell as the outmoded amateur, good at polo, a crack shot, slightly stupid and never tested in the field of battle. The only business he attends to properly is that of his sexual gratification. And yet Dowell is at pains to point out that ‘Edward’s life was an outline perfectly normal of the life of a hard-working, sentimental, and efficient professional man’ (102) – adjectives that at the time suggested German qualities, rather than English ones. In Nauheim modern English habits meet with the corrosive modernity of a German medical professionalism that enabled sexual transgression. The known benefits of the social aspects of the cure (which for many physicians tacitly included the erotic side of spa life) ultimately bring about a crisis of sexual and emotional excess which Dowell phrases as some sort of cathartic simulacrum: ‘it is  Searle, Quest for National Efficiency, p.76.   Perkin, Rise of Professional Society, p. 116; see also pp. 85ff. 46  Arnold White, Efficiency and Empire, ed. G.R. Searle, London, 1973, p. 292. 47   Esher to the Duchess of Sutherland, 7 September 1906, cited in Searle, Quest for National Efficiency, pp. 76–7. 44 45

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melodrama; but I can’t help it’ (77). The novel’s sexual and epistemological crises, however, are also constructed as crises of Englishness, denoted through the loci of its melodrama, the Hotel Englischer Hof and the English country house, both of which fail to contain transgressive desire as if were some heinous German bacillus that has infected its social fabric. In the lobby of that hotel, the lecherous Mr Bagshaw of Ludlow Hall blabs about Florence’s premarital sex life. In its corridor, all three of Edward’s women become literally entangled before they subsequently unravel: Maisie Maidan’s heart gives out, Leonora resorts to physical violence and confides in Florence, who wittingly or unwittingly overdoses on cyanide. As Violet Hunt astutely observed about English self-indulgence during her visit to Nauheim: English ‘weak hearts’ seemed to be the result of ‘some mad riot of nerves’.48 Incidentally, that was precisely the reverse diagnosis Ford himself arrived at regarding his own mental problems. ‘Hoc Est Corpus Meum’: Corporeal Modernity and the Talking Cure One of the crucial scenes in The Good Soldier is set in Marburg Castle and refers to the Marburg Colloquy of 1529 at which Luther and Zwingly discuss the meaning of the phrase ‘This is my body’ in the Eucharist. Zwingly saw it as figurative speech while Luther opted for a literal interpretation, writing on the table ‘hoc est corpus meum’. Florence’s provocative reading of the document as a guarantee of Ashburnham’s protestant superiority (thereby implicitly insulting Leonora’s Irish Catholicism) is underlined by her touching Edward’s wrist. A historical argument about transubstantiation in a novel about serial adultery seems odd and incongruous, particularly since the question of the status of the body in Christianity does not feature prominently in the plot until Leonora’s attempt to talk Nancy Rufford into sacrificing her virginity. Yet it is one of many references in the novel that point to the cultural and discursive construction of the body versus its concrete, physical and sexual manifestation: the story of the troubadour Peire Vidal and his hopeless courtship of La Louve; the Marburg Colloquy; the medical discourse of the spa; the material conditions of officers in the British military. All of these discursive bodies populate Dowell’s narrative as if they were defences against the actuality of the body, the reckless force of others’ sexual desire; as if they deconstructed, disembodied corporeality.49 Paradoxically, discursive bodies become a symptom of corporeal and sexual anxiety.  Hunt, Desirable Alien, p. 90.  I set my reading of Dowell’s discursive deconstruction of the body against two critical interpretations that focus on the construction of desire through language and on the curative nature of Dowell’s confession: Carol Jacobs, ‘The (Too) Good Soldier, a “Real Story”’, Glyph, 3 (1978): 39–45, 49–51. Kenneth Womack, ‘“It is all a Darkness”: Death, Narrative Therapy, and Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier’, Papers on Language and Literature, 38/3 (2002): 316–33. 48 49

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The spa as a socio-medical institution is a symptomatic locus in The Good Soldier. Early twentieth-century German health consciousness, which economically underpinned many spa institutions and gave rise to such phenomena as the life reform movements, medicalized modern contemporary anxieties, such as fears about personal and sexual inadequacies, failed social aspirations or frustrations in professional life. If modern life seemed overwhelming, the body at least could be controlled.50 Medical guidebooks about spa cures recommended Nauheim for patients with mild but chronic cardiac problems, in particular those with ‘irregular’ hearts produced by the excesses of alcohol, smoking, syphilis and neurasthenia.51 The treatment consisted of a careful arrangement of saline baths and gymnastics (so-called Schott exercises) under strict medical supervision, all of which was said to produce ‘a more efficient contraction of an ill-acting, flabby and dilated organ’.52 Inefficient and flabby hearts whose owners were too reluctant or too impecunious to set foot on German soil could also enjoy this treatment at Bath and Llangammarch in Wales, where it had been adopted. Further adaptation to even more affordable domestic use was popularized by Leslie Thorne Thorne’s The ‘Nauheim’ Treatment’of Chronic Diseases of the Heart in England, which went to six editions from 1904 to 1923. The spa thus acted as a signifier of a specifically German scientific modernity reflecting in its Gesamtarmentarium contemporary medical thinking and progress. These included specific dietary cures (grape, whey), callisthenic exercises, genteel mineral water cures, patented hydropathic treatments, air baths, electro-therapeutics, walking cures (Terrain Kur) and talking cures (psychoanalysis). The sexual aetiology of psychosomatic illnesses had entered the diagnostic register of the medical establishment at German spas when its English advocates could not find publishers for their books at home and long before Freud and his contemporaries had been translated into English. In Germany, the achievements of scientific progress were harnessed to help modern man and woman cope with the problems of modern life to which they had responded with modern pathologies that in turn required modern medical regimes. Cook’s Traveller’s Gazette advertised the Nauheim Gesamtarmentarium as a package of tradition and modernity, nature and science: ancient brine baths in an attractive location were supported by the ‘various auxiliary means of treatment provided by modern science’: ‘electro-therapeutics, Röntgen rays, Medico Mechanical Zander

50  See Michael Hau, The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany, Chicago, 2003, pp. 9–31. 51  See for instance, Siegmund Kohn, Wann und wie braucht man eine Luft-, Trink-, und Badekur im Kurort und zu Hause? Dresden, n.d., pp. 49–50. 52  Leslie Thorne Thorne, A Practical Guide to the Administration of the ‘Nauheim’ Treatment of Chronic Diseases of the Heart in England. London, 1904, p. 14. See also Hermann Weber, The Mineral Water and Health Resorts of Europe, London, 1898, p. 47, for a more detailed description of the medical aspects of the Nauheim treatment and the gymnastics.

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Institute, including Swedish gymnastics, vibration-massage etc.’53 The ‘etc.’ pointed to the inexhaustible remedial arsenal of modern science that promised cure. For satirical magazines like Punch, the spa was modern because it became an extension of the London season and a signifier of Edwardian conspicuous consumption where such horrendous contemporary afflictions as ‘errors of diet’, ‘motorface’, ‘Bridge-brow’ and ‘cigarette-heart’ might be exhibited rather than subjected to disciplinary regimes of the body. Like the illness, the cure was a symptom of modernity, a mere upper middle-class fashion accessory.54 In The Good Soldier medicalized modernity cannot be trusted either; it unjustly and improperly corporealizes existence. With the exception of the unfortunate Mrs Maidan, no one who claims to have a weak heart actually suffers from cardiac problems. Florence’s uncle dies from diseased lungs but his presumed affliction has provided his niece with sufficient information to fake her own condition. Edward, well enough to play polo, uses the Nauheim treatment to spend time with women he desires, first Mrs Maidan, then Florence and finally Nancy Rufford. Both Edward and Florence, then, cloak sexual desire in a medical discourse that proves surprisingly deceptive and unreliable. Dowell, too, uses Florence’s ‘condition’ to succumb to his own: he is ‘ready enough […] to refrain from manifestations of affection’ (63). Among the reasons he cites for his unconsummated marriage is ‘the conspiracy’ of doctors (63) who either wilfully or incompetently misdiagnosed his wife. His insistence that the body should be unequivocally readable by medical experts runs counter to the actual modern medical discourses of the time. Conventional professional medicine faced competition from psychoanalysis and various other alternative forms of viewing the body such as macrobiotics, holistic constitutionalism and natural therapy. This proliferation of medical and pseudomedical discourses indicates not just the high levels of anxiety about the body and its malfunctioning in modern life but about its growing ambiguity as a semiotic system that perhaps required more than one discourse in order to be decoded and remedied.55 Even the most advanced medical discourses of the time conceived of the body as a complex and not entirely reliable or intelligible translation organ. As Freud argued in the ‘Preliminary Communications’ (1893) to his and Breuer’s Studies on Hysteria, the reminiscence of psychic trauma manifested itself in somatic symptoms that had a ‘symbolic’ relation to the cause of this trauma.56 Ford encountered psychoanalysis in the many cures he undertook from 1903 to 1906 to tackle his mental illness. In Return to Yesterday he gave a humorous account of his admittedly ‘imaginary’ illness and its protracted mistreatment.57 Like   Bad Nauheim, Cook’s Traveller’s Gazette, 2 April 1910: 18–19; 19.   Punch, 22 August 1906; cited in Alison Adburgham (ed.), A Punch History of Manners and Modes, 1841–1940, Hutchinson, 1961, p. 201. 55   For an overview of this diversity see Hau, Cult of Health, Chs 5, 6. 56  Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer, Studies on Hysteria (1896), Standard Edition, vol. 2, p. 5. 57   Ford, Return to Yesterday, p. 201. 53

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Dowell he becomes ‘a wanderer upon the face of public resorts’, first resorting to a nerve cure near Lake Constance that subjected him to ‘ninety cold baths and thirty tepid soda douches in thirty days’. The meals consisted of dried peas and grapes. Onwards to a Rhenish Kaltwasser-Heilanstalt (Marienberg near Boppard), where a black-bespectacled practitioner prescribed a diet of ice cream and pork as well as boiling shampoos and ice-cold foot baths. There, and before in Vienna, his doctors seem to have enriched their Gesamtarmentarium with psychoanalyticallyinfluenced methods, confronting him with indecent photographs or the talking cure. Ford was a ‘hostile witness’ to what he called ‘that mania that since beset the entire habitable globe’ but his resistance is instructive and characteristic in its ambivalence.58 While The Good Soldier reveals the enfeebled hearts of his characters as deceitful symptoms of an uncontrollable sexuality that ultimately destroys them and their spouses, Ford insist that his faintness is not symptomatic of a sexual disorder that manifests itself in agoraphobia but the result of ‘a slight fluttering of the heart’.59 Almost three-dozen specialists concurred, however, that he was suffering from sexual abnormalities the precise nature of which is discreetly withheld from us. On the Rhine he is prescribed a diet that is supposed to be sexually stimulating. Ford attributes this improper insistence on the sheer modernity of, or the ‘mania’ for, psychoanalysis as a diagnostic tool. Could it be that the same writer who in 1910 was to become too scandalous in his marital irregularities to remain in London literary society, who sought to convince the local authorities in Giessen that he was a respectable citizen entitled to regain German nationality (and a divorce), was, at least then, as undersexed as his narrator Dowell? Ford recounts an anecdote in which the Viennese doctor predictably interprets his thoughts of a golden cup ‘as a symbol of something improper. I use the last two words on purpose. I suppose the choice of emblem is a hit at the Holy Grail’.60 A diagnosis of his dizziness as ‘a faint fluttering of the heart — after intense periods of overwork and fatigue’ finds much more favour. And after all, he says, agoraphobia is a disease of the willpower, which may in some cases be attributable to sexual diseases. Ford’s mental state in the years 1903 to 1906 has given critics plenty of scope for speculation and Freudian readings.61 What interests me here, however, is not the reason for his crisis, but how Ford writes about it in ways that both suggest and deny sexual desire (or its absence) as a result of an encounter with what he perceives to be a deluded and deluding modernity; a modern medical discourse 58

 Ibid., p. 204.  Ibid. 60  Ibid. Ultimately the Rhenish practitioner pronounces Ford as suffering from a defective circulation: Kreislaufstörung is a well-known diagnosis in Germany for all manner of imagined illnesses whose danger might be on the same level as low blood pressure. 61  See for instance Thomas C. Moser, The Life in the Fiction of Ford Madox Ford, Princeton, 1980, pp. 121–95; Max Saunders, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, Oxford, 1996, vol. I, pp. 173–95. 59

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that is in itself pathological (‘a mania’) and deals with tricky bodies that escape any diagnostic grasp. In Ford’s account it is the body that deceives the mind not the mind that betrays the body into its indecipherable symptomatology. Ford, like Dowell, continues with the regime that allegedly caused their trouble: Ford returns to writing, Dowell dedicates his attention to another sexually unavailable woman who needs a nurse-attendant. Other manifestations of modernity also prove untrustworthy to Ford.62 Attending an electrical exhibition at Frankfurt in 1894, he and his fellow students tried out a prototypical telephone: ‘You had the conviction that while you roared soft nothings into the mouthpiece at one end of the building another young man in the other box would be squeezing the hand of the charmer to whom your words were addressed’.63 Here, as in The Good Soldier, electricity dramatizes the body as sexually unavailable: in Florence’s Paris bedroom she is allegedly attached to an electrical alarm device while, after her death, Dowell’s memory displaces her actual corpse with ‘that pinkish effulgence from the electric lamps in the hotel lounge’ (64, 75). Electricity illuminates Dowell’s pathological desire for keeping women out of his reach. In this sense his confession is that of a masochist who has professionalized sexual renunciation into vicarious suffering:64 ‘For in Florence I had at once a wife and an unattained mistress […] and in the retaining of her in this world I had my occupation, my career, my ambition. It is not often that these things are united in one body’ (40). Whose body are we talking about here – Florence’s re- and desexualized corpus or Dowell’s professionalized existence? Florence’s ‘heart’ (that is, her desexualizing feigned heart condition) is an excuse for Dowell to preserve the dualism of having a wife and not having a wife; of successful and eternal courtship; of sex as remote nursing. Dowell as nurse can delude himself that he is the eternal troubadour. As he constructs ‘a shock-proof world’ (40), his own anxieties over Florence’s ‘heart’, the concerns over perennially difficult travel arrangements and the general business of steering conversations away from exciting ‘things’ come to replace sexuality itself. And despite Dowell’s final identification with Ashburnham as victim of a heartless woman, Ford pitches their pathologies against one another: the eunuch against the philanderer; the agoraphobic versus the colonizer; the professional nurse-attendant against the untested soldier.

 To be fair, in Return to Yesterday, Ford presents Germany as a juxtaposition of the archaic and the modern: ancient castles, duelling rituals and romantic German fairy tales alongside the rigours of German education, the company of Social Democrats and a spa cure in Soden (to treat a supposedly enlarged liver and a defective heart). 63   Ford, Return to Yesterday, pp. 97–8. 64  David Trotter reads Ashburnham the professional adulterer as paranoid; Paranoid Modernism, pp. 210–19. I find Dowell a more fascinating discursive construction and a better representative of Trotter’s interpretation of paranoia precisely because his narrative is such a convincing simulacrum of suffering in which he constructs himself as the most betrayed, most wronged, most deceived victim. 62

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Andrzej Gasiorek has argued that Dowell’s opening statement (‘this is the saddest story I have ever heard’) detaches him immediately from the events which he observes so obtusely and in which he can only retroactively participate through their discursive reconstruction.65 One is constantly reminded of Prufrock’s pathological inertia; of a life carefully measured out in coffee spoons. There is a fair indication, as I argued above, that Dowell is a patient (etherized in ambiguous discourse) even if he rejects this identity. Leonora certainly treats him like one. His wife has cleverly reversed the patient-nurse relationship by liberating herself from marital duties and inflicts ‘a régime’ (81) on him while presumably pursuing her own exercises behind closed doors. Even against Florence’s sexual appetite Dowell loses out. When she talks about food on the occasion of inviting the Ashburnhams to ‘eat out of the same trough’ (28) the implication is an erotic one. He can only admit to culinary greed as a compensation for ‘all their privations’ (38, 81). These privations are precisely the pleasures he masochistically enjoys and they become increasingly medicalized. At Nauheim, or more correctly Bad Nauheim, medicine officially preceded pleasure.66 Unlike Baden or Homburg, it promoted a more sober, rational and scientific image based on up-to-date knowledge of balneological, hydropathic, callisthenic and electrotherapeutic methods. This Gesamtarmentarium becomes Dowell’s sex life, either because he actively participates in it or because he imagines his wife participating in it. Florence’s regular disappearances behind the closed doors of a medical establishment, ostensibly to give herself over to corrective technologies and disciplinary regimes, lie halfway between Milly Theale’s vanishing act behind the doctor’s door in The Wings of the Dove and Septimus Warren Smith’s conjugal consultation in Mrs Dalloway. Yet while James shrouds the consulting room in opacity and Woolf demystifies diagnosis as so much wilfully obscure medical rhetoric, Ford constructs medical space beyond the door as a site of retrospective fantasy about the tormentingly pleasurable, unavailable female body: ‘I am going in here. I am going to stand so stripped and white and straight – and you are a man…’ (63). (Figs 4.3 to 4.5). Dowell consummates his marriage by becoming an attendant whose excitements are dependent on his wife’s visible overexertions. When he cannot look after Florence, he falls into the strange state of ‘nakedness’, of being ‘in the landscape’ without having any function in it. It is in those moments between existential angst and ennui that he turns into a Kurgast (spa patient) himself and corporealizes his own existence: the step counting resembles an urban version of the renowned German Terrain Kur; his Swedish gymnastics, like Schott exercises, are specifically recommended for heart patients.67

65

  Gasiorek, Ford’s Modernism, p. 14.  See also Fuhs, Mondäne Orte, p. 349. 67  See Weber, Mineral Water, pp. 47, 51, 103. 66

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Figure 4.3

‘I am going in here’. Bad Nauheim, entrance to bathhouse 7 from the Sprudelhof

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Figure 4.4

Bad Nauheim, bathhouse 7, lobby (c.1906)

Figure 4.5

Bad Nauheim, individual bath cells (c.1906)

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In this way, then, The Good Soldier is not just compensatory dirty talking but also a periphrastic narrative; it performs what Con Coroneos has called modernism’s ‘anxious discourse of a troubled interiority’ by letting the narrator volubly project his pathology onto his environment.68 Like a Baedeker, the spa offered prescribed activities, both medicinal and social. Spa guides advocated strict deference to the higher authority of the Kurarzt (spa doctor), whose orders were passed on to the hotel and the spa institutions where an arsenal of waiters and attendants supervised their observation. When Mark Twain underwent the cure in Baden-Baden, he realized that the spa’s unique combination of narcissism and masochism lucratively furnished an entire industry for the benefit of stoking social delusions (which was perhaps just as palliative as the treatments endured): ‘The appointments of the place are so luxurious, the benefit so marked, the price so moderate, and the insults so sure, that you very soon find yourself adoring the Friederichsbad and infesting it’. (133) With subtler irony Dowell also first notices the pose of elegant suffering appropriate for a cure in the Excelsior’s dining room in ‘the mien of the diners as they came in every evening – their air of earnestness as if they must go through a meal prescribed by the Kur authorities and their air of sobriety as if they must seek not by any means to enjoy their meals’ (23). This quasi-masochistic subjection was, however, liberally dosed with hedonistic pleasures precisely because the cure was a medical and psychological compensatory treatment for the damaged modern bodies of an industrial consumer society, restoring them to maximum productivity or at least functionality.69 The spa officially prescribed a disciplinary regime that was understood to include transgression (gambling, flirting, prostitution, adultery). Guides to European spas such as Hermann Weber’s The Mineral Water and Health Resorts of Europe (1898) pointed to the detrimental effects of both ennui and slavish obedience, and implied repeatedly that stringent observance of a medical regime without any strategic relaxation would simply tax the afflicted too much and have virtually no benefits for the healthy. The social aspects of spa life were ‘healthy mental influences’ and clearly regarded as beneficial.70 If doctors did not overtly recommend sexual licentiousness (as they had formerly done with gambling), it was common knowledge that the social life afforded erotic possibilities that were not available at home. In this respect the spa may be the very location that the Misses Hurlbirds take it for: ‘a sink of iniquity where strange laxities prevailed’ (59). After all, this is where the seeing eye of Florence the social climber immediately spots the man who for her embodies status and virility rather than merely money without sexual obligation. Certainly the literary trope of the spa joins illness and eroticism in which the resort becomes the stage or catalyst for female transgression: Zola’s ‘Les Coquillages de Monsieur Chabre’ (1864), Chekhov’s ‘Lady With Lapdog’ (1899), 68   Con Coroneos, ‘Heartless Modernism’, in Hugh Stevens and Caroline Howlett (eds), Modernist Sexualities, Manchester, 2000, pp. 130–47; p. 142. 69  See Fuhs, Mondäne Orte, p. 245. 70   Weber, Mineral Water, p. 43.

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Stefan Zweig’s ‘Brennendes Geheimnis’ (1911) and of course Ford’s novel. The spa corporealizes existence: it serves and services the body in its medical and sexual needs. If Florence’s sexual needs are catered for under the deceptive guise of medical treatment, her scheme is Dowell’s cure. He needs her to be sexually unavailable, and the German spa is the location in which sex is rerouted, converted into ‘treatment’ and thus consummated through identification and displacement; it is both enabled and prohibited. But if Germany offers locations and procedures for the treatment of foreign bodies, it is perhaps time to examine the German body itself more closely, particularly in its spectacular representation through English eyes. As we shall see in the two next chapters, this body will undergo an extraordinary transformation from ‘bad’ modernity to admirable modernism; from grotesque corporeality to futurist signifier.

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Chapter 5

‘Monster Men and Women’ Woolf’s Grotesque German Body and Lawrence’s ‘Bad’ Modernity In her essay ‘Professions for Women’ (1931), originally a lecture addressed to the Women’s Service League, Virginia Woolf conceded that for a woman to talk about the body was a near insurmountable problem: ‘telling the truth about my own experiences as a body, I do not think I solved’. This was not just a lament about social and moral codes that made it impossible for a woman writer or for any writer to discuss sex and pleasure freely. It was also a personal admission about the awkward relationship between language and corporeal experience for which in English culture there seemed so little discursive or conceptual space. She also complained about the reductiveness of psychoanalysis and its influence on fiction (‘Freudian fiction’); about the limits of the Georgian writers’ focus on the materiality of social reality as if this were all there was to life (‘Modern Fiction’); about the monotony of Joyce’s scatological and carnivalesque bodies in Ulysses; about the legal restriction on representing homosexuality, birth control, suicide and ‘other subjects more or less unpopular in Whitehall’; but as a publisher she was only too keenly aware of the limits on what could and could not be said in print. Indeed, as Celia Marshik has demonstrated, from her earliest journalistic efforts, Woolf’s aesthetics were caught up in a dialectics of censorship that was the result of an ambivalent engagement with regulatory discourses and allowed her and other modernists a progressive stance in public while at the same time shaping their writing through self-censorship, irony and satire. What we see in her writing, and in much modernist writing in general, is an endeavour to formulate a discourse of the body that is neither banal nor pornographic, neither materialistic nor florid, but that seeks to articulate ways in which corporeal being shapes consciousness and vice versa, without neglecting the manner in which social reality constructs both, or indeed the way in which social movements aim to reconstruct the body.   Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays, ed. Leonard Woolf, London, 1966, vol. 2, p.



208.



 Ibid., p. 234.   ‘The New Censorship’, Nation & Athenaeum, Vol. 43, No. 28 (Sept. 1928): 726.    Marshik, British Modernism and Censorship, pp. 88–125.   See for instance Donald Childs’s analysis of Mrs Dalloway and A Room of One’s Own in Modernism and Eugenics for both their discursive circulation and critique of 

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English publications on sex as different in tone as Cassell’s Question of Sex series and Marie Stopes’s Married Love (1918) had a strong eugenicist agenda, but where the one argued for social control and libidinal restraint in the light of widespread degeneration fears, the other opted for purplish prose and advocated – controversially at the time – birth control as necessary for marital sexual pleasure. Stopes’s was perhaps the first widely available book on the topic that conceived of sex as a pleasure rather than a biological necessity-cum-civic duty, and its spectacular success is a fair indication of the sexual ignorance and unhappiness of its intended audience, the British ‘educated classes’. English culture, including the medical establishment as we have seen in Chapter 3, found it difficult to distinguish between sexology, medical discourses on sex, and pornography, particularly since the origin of those discourses was seen as foreign. Discursive sex was literally alien to English culture, and modernism’s struggle with censorship is perhaps symptomatic of a gradual naturalization of discursive sex that still resorts to the trope of the ‘foreign’, as we have seen in the discussion of Ford’s The Good Soldier, a novel set in Germany, described as the best French novel in English, in which an American narrator compulsively talks about the sexual promiscuity of an allegedly impeccable Englishman while conceding that he knows very little of ‘the question of the sex-instinct’ (79). The German body is by no means the only collectivized corpus onto which representational and national anxieties about sex and the body were projected: the Jewish body, the homosexual body and the Irish body were subject to similar forms of ambivalence. In a letter to Nicholas Bagenal, Woolf stated that ‘the directness of the language’ in Joyce’s Ulysses prevented her from printing it, asking her correspondent if this was ‘an Irish quality’? Were crudity and obscenity a matter of national habitus? Could one write about the body or about sex in English as an English writer at all or would these subjects have to remain in the hands of continental scientists and ‘French’ novelists? In this chapter I want to examine the confluence of corporeality, national identity and modernity in some works by Woolf and Lawrence because both make a point of articulating their ambivalences about certain types of modernity through eugenic ideas, pp. 38–75, or Marshik’s analysis of textual traces of Woolf’s engagement with the Social Purity movement in British Modernism and Censorship, pp. 88–126.    Marie Stopes, Married Love, ed. Ross McKibbin, Oxford, 2004, p. 22; see also McKibbin’s introduction to Stopes, pp. xxxvi & xlviii. Edward Carpenter, who influenced her work and who was the one Briton to have championed similar ideas to the German life reform movements in the fin de siècle, had a similarly limited audience. See George Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle-Class Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe, Madison, WI, 1985, pp. 62–3.    See for instance, Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus (eds), Modernity, Culture and ‘the Jew’, Cambridge, 1998. Cheyette, Constructions of ‘the Jew’. Lisa Hopkins, ‘The Irish and the Germans in the Fiction of John Buchan and Erskine Childers’, Irish Studies Review, 9/1 (2001): 69–80.    Woolf, Collected Letters, vol. 2, p. 231.

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a grotesque national habitus identified as German. In extremis the grotesque is the device of caricature and national stereotype, and this usage was certainly still prevalent in the early twentieth century. For Peter Edgerly Firchow, Conrad’s Germans largely fall into this category of the preposterous, although we can perhaps also see a much more anxious mood informing Conrad’s grotesques, as I suggested in Chapter 1. As we shall see, Woolf and Lawrence were still working within a Victorian tradition of the grotesque that, in turn, took its inspiration from German art and culture.10 Like the Victorians they critiqued modernity through the form of the grotesque. As Shelagh Wilson has argued, Victorian art critics feared that modern manufacturing would create a ‘culture of the grotesque’, meaning hideous and hideously popular design. The grotesque destabilized the ‘real’; it harnessed the uncanny and monstrous to the comical but it retained the tension between the two in ‘a sense of physical contact, of connection with the body’ in a grammar of ornament that transgressed the formal boundaries of an object.11 Ceramic jugs partly shaped as frogs’ bodies or empty heads, taxidermied monkeys as candleholders, earrings made from birds’ heads – these are all examples of Victorian popular grotesque design. The boundaries Victorian art critics clearly wished to police were those between High Art, legitimized by the select choices of the cognoscenti, and the uninformed tastes of the masses; between utilitarian objects and purely decorative ornaments; and increasingly between individually crafted objects and mass produced articles. The Victorian grotesque is one genre that concentrates contemporary concerns about the meaning of art (and craftsmanship) in an industrialized society. In the fiction of Lawrence and Woolf, the grotesque is also a form in which anxieties about crossed boundaries can be articulated, if not contained. For Lawrence the boundary is primarily that between the body and the machine; for Woolf it is the boundary between the body-undercontrol and the body-out-of-control, the body-in-excess-of-itself, the body that foregrounds its physicality over intellect and above all the eating body. I would like to examine how Edwardian culture framed its discomfort with the body as a site of pleasure, as a site of (re)production and as a site of consumption before moving on to forge an explicit connection between grotesque Germanness and ‘bad’ modernity in both writers’ work. Contemporary Germany becomes the site of a sceptical discourse about what modernity does to the body. Like Forster and Wells, Lawrence responds to this ‘bad’ modernity of the mechanistic age, of which Germany is increasingly seen as   Firchow, Death of the German Cousin, p. 51.   See Colin Trodd et al. (eds), Victorian Culture and the Idea of the Grotesque. Aldershot, 1999, p. 8. The editors cite among influences on the Victorian grotesque Jean Paul and E.T.A. Hoffmann (particularly for Carlyle), German illustrations in neo-gothic style in the 1840s, and Dutch and German pre-Renaissance art as an influence on the PreRaphaelites. 11  Shelagh Wilson, ‘Monsters and Monstrosities: Grotesque Taste and Victorian Design’, in Trodd, Victorian Culture, pp. 146–8. 

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an aggressive and hyperbolic manifestation. But he also takes into account German counter-impulses, which, from the 1890s onwards, demanded the liberation of the body from industrial instrumentalization through the life reform movement, Freikörperkultur, physical culture and the Wandervogel youth movement. We need to see his rejection of mechanical modernity in the context of a nostalgic return to a pastoral, non-mechanistic age that is a reaction to the cataclysm of war (that other symptom of disastrous modernity). In Britain, however, those modern and anti-modern impulses were never galvanized into the genuinely popular, organized mass phenomena that would characterize German corporeal modernity in the 1920s, reaching across classes and political affiliations.12 For Lawrence these ‘progressive’ developments indicated Germany’s wholesome return to an old, more organic way of life, mythical in its corporeal power: No wonder the old Romans stood in astonishment before the huge blond limbs of the savage Germania. […] Everything so physical. Such magnificent naked limbs and naked bodies, and in the streets, in the hotels, everywhere, bare, white arms of women and bare, brown, powerful knees and thighs of men. The sense of flesh everywhere, and the endless ache of flesh. 13

This passage is taken from the Tyrolean sections of The Captain’s Doll (1923), a highly problematic novella that contrasts the right with the wrong sort of living – problematic less for its purple rhapsody about Teutonic knees than for its peculiar combination of misogyny, imperialism and anti-Semitism. The nobly ‘savage’ Hun seems to live on in twentieth-century Germanic races in a physical prowess exhibited with pride. Visiting Bayreuth in 1909, Virginia Woolf experienced contemporary Germany as an incongruous culture, extreme in its manifestations: ‘Everything is new art – the restaurants have single lines drawn up the walls, with triangles suddenly bursting out – the kind of thing one sees in the Studio. The grossness of the race is astonishing […] monster men and women drink great jugs of beer and eat meat’.14 At a time when eugenics attempted to put a stop to the proliferation of monstrosities and deficiencies, the unhampered gastronomic enjoyment of German patrons causes revulsion. But how can these jolly monsters embrace art nouveau ornament   For studies of German corporeal modernism see Hau, Cult of Health. Chad Ross, Naked Germany: Health, Race and the Nation, Oxford, 2005. A good indication of the essentially continental impulses towards corporeal modernism was the Modernism exhibition at the London Victoria and Albert Museum in 2006. See also Ch. 7 in the exhibition catalogue, Christopher Wilks, ‘The Healthy Body Culture’, in Christopher Wilks (ed.), Modernism, 1914–1939: Designing A New World, London, 2006. Harold B. Segel, Body Ascendant: Modernism and the Physical Imperative, Baltimore, 1998. 13  D.H. Lawrence, Three Novellas: The Ladybird, The Fox, The Captain’s Doll, Harmondsworth, 1963, p. 215. 14   Woolf, Collected Letters, vol. 1, pp. 404–5. 12

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so ubiquitously? How is it that this ‘gross’ society champions progress and modern art so unequivocally? As we shall see, English responses to the German body do not necessarily interpret corporeal modernism as a symptom of a common anxiety but as the very opposite, as a national habitus of physical indulgence, lack of restraint, excessive pleasure or, the very opposite, an apocalyptic entropic progress that eventually destroys the body. ‘No Gaps in Germans’: German Appetites and the Edwardian Consumer Economy In much Edwardian and early modernist fiction, Germans are represented as gargantuan gluttons, constantly eating and occupying too much space. The association of food and Germanness may also have had its roots in conspicuous employment bunching occasioned by immigration. German bakers and confectioners furnished much of the workforce for the late Victorian food industry while large numbers of German waiters supplied the Edwardian catering industry with seasonal labour. Both were known for their skills as well as for their willingness to work hard, efficiently and for lower wages than their British counterparts.15 More often, however, combining consumption with national signifiers went beyond the socioeconomic patterns. Metabolic metaphors serve Katherine Mansfield’s cousin Elizabeth von Arnim to characterize a German will to domination. In The Solitary Summer (1899) the children of an Anglo-German marriage begin to lose their bilingualism through a form of linguistic imperialism: ‘Indeed, as they get older the German asserts itself more and more, and is threatening to swallow up the little English they have left entirely’ (49). In the more caustic The Caravaners (1909) a head waiter remarks on a Prussian Baron’s immoderate demand for eight breakfast rolls, while the female narrator of The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rügen (1904) notes the gigantic menus offered by the island’s restaurants. Food production and consumption in von Arnim’s novels become an all-consuming business. This business shapes and misshapes the hausfrau’s life in The Solitary Summer: ‘I never think of anything but sausages. My horizon is bounded by them’ (73). More than simply a domestic duty, food is part of national character and physique: ‘I am afraid that as a nation we think rather more of our eating and drinking than is reasonable, and this no doubt explains why so many of us, by the time we are thirty, have lost the original classicality of our contour’ (136). Half-disguised in the narrator’s ‘we’ is of course the non-German’s disapproval of a nation’s culinary excess, its undisguised pleasure in eating, its unreasonable appetite. For Conrad, as we saw in Chapter 1, it was easy to infer a lack of moral fibre and restraint from the loss of ‘contour’; when Gustav So-and-So’s lardy bulk spills out of his clothes, this image

15   See Panikos Panayi, ‘German Immigrants in Britain, 1815–1914’, in Panikos Panayi (ed.), Germans in Britain since 1500, London, 1996.

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becomes a synecdoche for Germans bursting over the boundaries of their country into hitherto unclaimed territory in Africa and Asia. Increasingly, Germany’s claim for international recognition or ‘greatness’ seemed to be matched by and compared to corporeal largesse even by those who were Germanophiles. A short travel report from a spa in the Taunus mountains in The Nineteenth Century in 1900 finds much incongruity in the fact that a nation so musical can tolerate what appears to be physical sloth: ‘these fat, placid-looking Germans’ form a ‘a mass which corporeally and spiritually is echt Deutsch!’.16 In The Desirable Alien, Ford’s lover Violet Hunt strained under so much coffee and cream cakes: ‘that is why there are no gaps in Germans – they are so adequately filled’ (38). Yet corpulent Teutons did not seem to consider their condition pathological, for they were glaringly absent from the spa towns, where ‘real Germans’ ate modestly and walked for miles. The rotund German had only become ‘echt Deutsch’ or (stereo)typically German in cliché. For Hunt, this trope said more about the ‘ascetic, patient, plain cook-ridden English’, ‘born without any very strong pleasure in eating’ and suffering from permanent indigestion: ‘English self-indulgence would appear to take the form of malnutrition’ (40, 90). With their institutional focus on the body, spa towns provided an international spectrum of shapes and sizes. We recall John Dowell’s international taxonomy on the steps of the Hotel Englischer Hof in Ford’s The Good Soldier. However, Hunt observed in Nauheim that the Germans appeared to have found a different physical regime that accommodated appetite rather than restrained it: The continual daily indulgence in luscious and humour-forming foods and drinks is, I really think, the raison d’être of the Teuton’s immense and comprehensive system of summer Kurs. The German over-greased digestive organs are the counterparts of those of the abstemious, constipated Englishman. The Englishman fares to Homburg or Wiesbaden sadly, drearily, to try to modify the results on a poor moral body of a moral régime self-prescribed. The German goes happily, heartily to be finally and absolutely cured of a plethora of enjoyment, of a year’s whole-souled gourmandising. (40–1)

It is the English body that seems subjected to a joyless quasi-militaristic regime of discipline, endlessly drilled and regimented yet underused and deprived while the German enjoys even the brief discipline of the Kur (which as we know included a range of compensatory indulgences as well).17 The key word here, surely, is 16   Millicent Sutherland, ‘In Germany – A Sketch’, The Nineteenth Century, 38 (1895): 644–8, pp. 644–5. 17   King Edward VII, known for his indulgences and having worked through the epicurean winter menus of the period, subjected himself ‘heartily’ to the German Kur regime, gracing Homburg annually for thirty-odd years to shed the pounds thus piled on. See Alexis Gregory, The Golden Age of Travel, 1880–1939, London, 1998, pp. 35ff. and Joseph Wechsberg, The Lost World of the Great Spas, New York, 1979, p. 68.

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pleasure. The Germans are offensively visible not just in their physical presence (Lawrence’s ‘sense of flesh everywhere’) but in their corporeal delight: they take pleasure in and through the body. In fact they have a completely different relationship to their body. ‘Over-greased’ it may be but it seems to work like a well-lubricated human machine that consumes as well as produces pleasure rather than a sluggish engine, fed on very little and yet full of shit: ‘over-greased’ versus ‘constipated’. It is hard not to draw a comparison between metabolic rates and industrial prowess; between faltering technological progress and insufficiently competitive heavy-industry output in Britain and the astonishing rate of steel and coal production, the stellar rise of the chemical industry and the proportionate increase in self-confident corpulence in the German Reich. The implication in Hunt’s argument is clearly that it is not just the lack of appetite, the poor food and the permanent self-restraint that ultimately produce an ill-functioning human body. It is a whole moral outlook and a way of life that leads to English corporeal abjection. One might do well to remember here that the proverbial opulence of Edwardian dinner tables and the pre-war quality and affordability of London restaurants was only within the reaches of a rather thin social stratum.18 The middle classes certainly enjoyed unprecedented choice in food and consumer articles, but their rich, bland cuisine seems hardly conducive to stimulating appetites or metabolisms even by non-epicurean standards, hence the repeated focus on constipation in contemporaneous dietary advice manuals, such as G.F. Scottson-Clark’s Eat Well and Keep Well (1926), in which ‘Constipation and Indgestion’ forms the longest chapter. One of the fascinating insights emerging from Alison Light’s recent analysis of Virginia Woolf’s relationship with her servants is the dullness of Woolf’s palate (strangely focused on semolina) and the stodginess of early twentieth-century English ‘cuisine’.19 In addition, urban living had complicated effects on diet and, according to John Burnett and Stephen Mennell, between a quarter and a third of the population still lived in ‘poverty’, suffering from poor housing, poor diet and poor health.20 Growing social unrest in the pre-war years was only one of the symptoms of the widening gap between the growing choice and affluence of the middle classes and the continued privations of the urban working class. Like English global supremacy, the English body was perceived to be in crisis. Nowhere had this become more propagandistically relevant to eugenicists than in the recruitment fiasco of the Second Boer War, when three out of five

 See John Burnett, Plenty and Want: A Social History of Diet in England from 1815 to the Present Day, London, 1979, pp. 229, 294. 19  Alison Light, Mrs Woolf and the Servants, Harmondsworth, 2008. 20  See Burnett, Plenty and Want, p. 126. Stephen Mennell, All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present, Oxford, 1985, pp. 226ff. 18

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working-class bodies had allegedly been rejected as unfit for service.21 Eugenic movements warning against deterioration leading to ‘degeneracy’ were certainly an international phenomenon, but their aims enjoyed particularly keen audiences in England amongst the concerned middle classes: while Germany looked to future greatness, Britain had an empire to defend (more on this dialectic in the next chapter). Maintaining their own physical regimes as well as disciplining the working-class body seemed to be one way in which they could contain fermenting discontent and social unrest. Middle-class ladies advised slum dwellers on nutritious diets; paramilitary organizations modelled on the middle-class Boy Scouts steered children away from the streets into meaningful and healthy play that instructed them about civic duties; endless lecturing by ostensibly benevolent persons provided something of an education in whatever paltry leisure time there remained for the lower orders; temperance movements pestered the frequenters of public houses – rarely had charitable and well-meaning initiatives made such an all-round effort at policing the working-class body; a body that collectively and individually, it seemed, was simply not working well enough.22 It was not merely this body that appeared in need of improvement but any English body. While German corporeal debates often reflected a focus on pleasure, efficiency and perfectibility that demanded personal activity, English discourses dwelled on anxieties that could only be alleviated through consumption. Germans stripped off and sweated; the English took pills. The English body remained a social body, even if its symptoms were manifestations of a diseased individuality. It was firmly locked into a national market economy in which a vast patent medicine system promised cure (not perfectibility!) through consumption.23 Somehow the body seemed out of place in modernity, too concrete, and in its materiality newly inadequate. Edwardian culture invested a tremendous amount of time, money and effort into remedying this reluctant, slow and woefully malfunctioning body, even if these measures are often ridiculed by its writers.24 No other nation in Europe swallowed so many potions, pastilles, drops, pills and quack patent medicines 21   For the difficulty of obtaining reliable data about recruitment statistics and for their manipulation by various interest groups see Richard Soloway, ‘Counting the Degenerates: the Statistics of Race Deterioration in Edwardian England’, Journal of Contemporary History, 17/1 (1982): 137–64, at p. 140. 22   Although the working-class body and its shortcomings feature prominently in eugenic debates and in discussions about military defence, social insurance and national economy, there does not yet seem to be as pervasive a link between citizenship and corporeal integrity, national duty and the healthy body before the war as there would be in the 1930s. 23  See Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914, London, 1991, pp. 187, 193. 24  Dolly Wilcox’s callisthenic machine, her husband’s appalling driving manner and their reproductive success in Howards End are signifiers of the Wilcoxes’ modernity – and of their callous stupidity, which may be eugenically endorsable but is culturally deplorable.

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per capita than the English.25 Here was a country that fancied itself permanently under threat, assaulted, overwhelmed and swamped by all manner of existing and imaginary diseases; small wonder that many of the miracle cures promised to remedy just about anything, from migraines to obesity, from ‘Maladies of Indiscretion’ to menstrual irregularities, from gammy legs to invasion anxiety. According to Thomas Richards, Edwardian magazines advertised such an astonishing array of products for corporeal maintenance, prevention and cure that we can speak of a ‘health culture’ that commodifies the body, or more precisely of a ‘therapeutic imperialism’ that colonizes the body with remedies in order to transform it into a spectacular commodity.26 As the nexus of a Foucauldian discursive disciplinary regime on the one hand and a consumer society whose mechanisms of production and consumption construct corporeal norms and objects of desire on the other, the body now needs to be maintained and managed like one of the signifiers of social status.27 The epitome of this confluence of sceptical modernity and the fictions pedalled by advertising is H.G. Wells’s pessimistic Tono-Bungay, in which Edward Ponderevo’s gigantic financial empire of chance and bluff rests on the fraudulent benefits of a patent medicine.28  Richards, Commodity Culture, p. 172.  Ibid., pp. 194–5. 27  See Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths & Structures, trans. Chris Turner, London, 2006, and particularly Lawrence Birken, Consuming Desire: Sexual Science and the Emergence of a Culture of Abundance, 1871–1914, Ithaca, 1988 for useful differentiations of Foucault’s argument, in The History of Sexuality, about sexual knowledge as an increasingly institutionalized discourse of power that regulates social subjects. Both place the body and the construction of sexual subjects and sexual knowledge at the confluence of scientific and economic discourses in the late nineteenth century. It is perhaps no coincidence that Freud, in his 1914 essay on narcissism, deployed economic metaphors to conceptualize desire. For Freud, narcissism short-circuits the heterosexual economy because it blocks libidinal cathexis of an extrinsic object of desire. In the consumer economy, however, narcissism is the driving motor of production. Only when the deficient subject takes itself as a perfectible object does consumption become a conduit of love. 28  Not all modernists adhered to Wells’s pessimism, though, and there is good evidence that the modernity of advertising shaped the modernism of style as well. Advertising, more than any other phenomenon of modern consumer culture, seeped into the contemporary novel in the same way in which it had infested culture as a whole, partly as a representation of external social reality, retail capitalism or modernity but also as a signifier of how consumption was beginning to shape consciousness, desire and identity. See Richards, Commodity Culture and David Trotter, ‘Too Much of a Good Thing: Fiction and the “Economy of Abundance”’, The Critical Quarterly, 34/4 (1992): 27–51. Let us think here of the aeroplane spectacularly spelling out some comically indecipherable item in Mrs Dalloway (Kreemo? Blaxo? toffee?), or the bar of lemon soap Bloom purchases for Molly in Ulysses. By the time Dorothy L. Sayers sets Lord Peter Wimsey to think up snappy slogans for an advertising agency in Murder Must Advertise (1933), modern commodity culture had acquired sinister overtones not merely because it altered minds but because it produced an astonishing output of corpses. 25

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In this climate of bodily insufficiency the German body becomes both a symptom of and a locus for a particularly anxious discourse about modernity. What interests me about this discourse is why the German body is so often present – conspicuously, vulgarly, grotesquely – when this cultural unease about the English physical condition is articulated. In fact these specifically English anxieties seem to be articulated through a commentary on the German body as if the ubiquitously and shrilly advertised but silently consumed patent medicines are part of a regime of Protestant restraint and self-control that distinguish the English and which the Germans so sorely lack. ‘The Troubles of the Flesh!’ Chocolate Eclairs and ‘Puddings of Red Dough’ Mrs Dalloway (1925) is remarkable for the way in which Woolf represents consciousness as shaped by the material world and vice versa. Food is not unimportant in the novel, nor is the body. Its needs, pleasures, pains and desires furnish some of the most vivid scenes: Sally Seton running naked along a passage; Clarissa Dalloway remembering the revelation of Sally’s kiss; Peter Walsh’s inability to march at the pace of the young recruits whom he nonetheless deems ‘weedy’; Septimus Warren Smith contemplating bananas on a sideboard, suddenly gripped by a panic at his emotional anaesthesia. Early on in the novel, Clarissa Dalloway remarks on her new body consciousness, or rather her disappearing physicality, as a disappointment: But often now this body she wore (she stopped to look at a Dutch painting), this body, with all its capacities, seemed nothing – nothing at all. She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street, this being Mrs Dalloway.29

Mainstream culture deems the middle-aged woman a nonentity in a sea of inconspicuous, anonymous bodies because it still defines femininity through youth and sexual availability. However, this menopausal epiphany30 does not fully explain the oddity of the first sentence. To whom does this body seem nothing – to Clarissa or to those whose gaze this body might have captured? In fact the sentence suggests a cleft between the life of the mind and the life of the body since 29   Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, ed. Claire Tomalin, Oxford, 1992, p. 13. All subsequent references to this edition are cited parenthetically in the text. 30   In her reading of Woolf Teresa Fulker makes a convincing case for the way in which Woolf’s modernist attention to consciousness is increasingly shaped by an admittedly vexed relationship to the body, particularly menopause in the various fictional versions of Mrs Dalloway. See ‘Virginia Woolf’s Daily Drama of the Body’, Woolf Studies Annual, 1 (1995): 3–25, at pp. 10–17.

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the latter is ‘worn’ like a habit, like something that more or less adequately houses consciousness but could be taken off like an ill-fitting garment. The impulse to reflect on this body comes from a foreign agent, Dutch painting, known for its interest in opulent corporeality and the materiality of life. While Clarissa’s body fades and its pleasures can only be enjoyed as reminiscences, another body intrudes forcefully into her thoughts only three paragraphs later: Miss Kilman, who is perhaps the strongest physical presence in the book because she is characterized almost exclusively through her body and through the way in which others respond to her body. Only much later in the novel do we actually meet Miss Kilman and her Lawrentian ‘endless ache of flesh’, but she is undoubtedly constructed early on as an excessive corporeality that even in its abstraction contrasts with Clarissa’s more sympathetically drawn disembodiment: ‘for it was not her one hated but the idea of her which undoubtedly had gathered into itself a great deal that was not Miss Kilman; […] one of those spectres who stand astride us and suck up half our lifeblood’ (14). What could produce such violent emotion in the refined Clarissa other than the obstinate intrusion of an otherwise peripheral social reality outside her class? What could call up such peculiar metaphors in a writer otherwise refraining from the excesses of gothic prose? First Miss Kilman is dematerialized into an idea that swells with hideous, vague connotations until she partially rematerializes as a spectre that turns into an aggressive vampire. This vampire exchanges lifeblood for bodily feelings of hatred – a hatred directed at the impertinence of social consciousness and poverty: For Miss Kilman would do anything for the Russians, starve herself for the Austrians, but in private inflicted positive torture, so insensitive was she, dressed in a green mackintosh coat. Year in year out she wore that coat; she perspired; she was never in the room five minutes without making you feel her superiority, your inferiority; how poor she was; how rich you were; how she lived in a slum without a cushion or a bed or a rug or whatever it might be. (14)

Miss Kilman’s telescopic philanthropy is perhaps well-matched by Clarissa’s guilt-ridden snobbery towards a working woman who has, we are told, become an object of affection for her grown daughter. We catch a glimpse here of the deep mutual resentment between the classes that is barely masked by benevolent charity on the one side and grateful deference on the other. Again the choice of words is interesting: Miss Kilman’s insensitivity seems to consist of her inability and unwillingness to hide the material evidence of her class and her body. Like the prewar German governess so frequently employed in middle-class households and swiftly dispatched to the Fatherland once war had been declared, Doris Kilman is a foreign agent in the Dalloway residence. She inflicts pain, causes embarrassment and awkwardness, and stirs up violent irrational hatreds (‘this brutal monster’) that during the war had been habitually attributed to the Beastly Hun.

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Like Forster’s Schlegel sisters, Miss Kilman is indeed of German origin and her anglicized name does not bode well in times of war. Her effort at resisting xenophobia and propaganda despite personal loss earns her dismissal from her teaching position: ‘because she would not pretend that the Germans were all villains – when she had German friends, when the only happy days of her life had been spent in Germany!’ (161). When we meet Miss Kilman in the flesh she stands on the landing in the offensive green mackintosh waiting to take Elizabeth Dalloway to the Army and Navy Stores. These passages, with their frequent shifts in point of view between Clarissa and Miss Kilman, are more than female cattiness between two middle-aged women; they enact class warfare without so much as a word being uttered while thoughts are focused on the physical revaluation and destruction of the other. Kilman, ‘heavy, ugly, commonplace’, becomes a taciturn ‘prehistoric monster armoured for primeval warfare’ while Clarissa’s ‘delicate body’ needs to be felled, humiliated, made to work in a factory (162-4). Both attempt to deny to themselves that it is the body of the other that induces such hostile emotional responses. Yet Miss Kilman realizes, ‘It is the flesh that she must control […] she had not mastered the flesh. Ugly, clumsy, Clarissa Dalloway had laughed at her for being that; and had revived the fleshly desires, for she minded looking as she did beside Clarissa’ (167). The flesh signifies vanity, or simply a consciousness of one’s own appearance, and of course physical pleasure: Peter Walsh, who is in love with the wife of a Major in the Indian Army, is also suffering from ‘the troubles of the flesh’ (67). He regards the flesh as an agent beyond his control. Inspired by the heroes of Empire, he is ruled by the temptations of AngloIndia. For Doris Kilman, the flesh is the only thing that can be controlled, and through it, all manner of other desires and realities; yet she herself succumbs to the pure pleasures of the body, for the next thing the unhappy Miss Kilman will greedily enjoy is eating chocolate éclairs at the Stores. Highly aware of her inelegant appearance, the ignominies of life are a response to ‘the infliction of her unlovable body which people could not bear to see’ (168). In a novel that pays so much attention to the modernism of its style, a caricature like Miss Kilman, grotesque in her overdetermined physicality, seems an anachronistic device (of the ‘materialist’ kind Woolf rejected in ‘Modern Fiction’), particularly since she appears to be an agent of modernity, able to inspire independence and purpose in a young woman who might not think of political luncheons or sophisticated soirées as her sole ambition in life. In a book populated by middle-aged characters who are disappointed with life and whose pleasures are chiefly composed of memories and snatched epiphanies, Miss Kilman still represents a link between the generations, and like Peter Walsh the inventor of ploughs, she works for the future rather than chiefly lives through the past. Equipped with a degree, knowledge and energy, she seems to be plucked from the very audience to whom Woolf would address herself in ‘Professions for Women’ and the lectures that would eventually become A Room of One’s Own. And yet in this novel, Miss Kilman’s class and body seem to imply Woolf’s reluctance to

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endorse modernity in the guise of social change for women.31 Precisely because she is the product of modernity (educated, articulate, highly self-aware, impecunious but independent) she raises anxieties about the kinds of material changes social progress might bring about: would it be possible for the charming Elizabeth to become a woman doctor without also turning into the charmless Miss Kilman? Would she perspire, wear ill-fitting clothes, suck the life-blood out of her middleclass patients? In fact a character like Miss Kilman embodies the mechanism of projection. A representative of the educated, working woman, she is too much of everything: too much brain and too much body. She represents Woolf’s ‘bad’ modernity through all the tropes we have already seen at work in pre-war fiction: unseemly appetite, German descent, excessive visibility, grotesque corporeality. And yet, like the ‘grotesque riot [of] obese and invisible bodies’ of washing in Conrad’s ‘Falk’, Miss Kilman produces a ‘grotesque riot’ in Clarissa Dalloway’s thoughts. She embodies the paradoxical phenomenon of the grotesque in combining excessive physicality and social marginality; the tension between her near-invisibility as a minor character and her spectral, monstrous omnipresence as a preoccupation. Miss Kilman perhaps anticipates some of the dismissive critical reactions Woolf incurred from her contemporaries when she voiced her anger at social discrimination against women in Three Guineas (1938). The very process of splitting The Pargiters into novel (The Years) and essay (Three Guineas) already suggests something uncontainable, beyond the remit of hybrid form. Here, suddenly, was Woolf as Doris Kilman, in a green mackintosh, ‘all her soul rusted with that grievance sticking in it […] poor, embittered, unfortunate creature’ (13). The construct of Miss Kilman shows how acutely Woolf was aware of the body, particularly a woman’s body, as a very vulnerable part of her public identity; both Clarissa and Miss Kilman ‘wear’ their respective bodies, curiously not at home in their corporeal existence and desirous of being divested of it in moments of discomfort. (Woolf’s revenge, of course, is the photographs that support the argument in Three Guineas and exhibit the preposterousness, the grotesque spectacle of English male-bodies-in-power.) Woolf’s first encounter with Germany betrayed similar responses to those galvanized in her representation of Miss Kilman. What is most notable about her letters to Vanessa Bell written during her visit to Bayreuth in 1909 is not the clichés 31

  Molly Hite has argued that throughout Woolf’s career she created two bodies; the social body of fact and the visionary body. The former can experience only culturally constructed longings [para 33] while the latter ‘experiences without social implications’ [para 9], offering a utopian mode of representing female eroticism and other sensations without social consequences [para 36]. Perspiring Miss Kilman has very little chance of escaping the social body precisely because she is a working woman – both class and gender are against her, although one cannot quite help wondering if class isn’t the stronger factor in Woolf’s uncharitable creation. Molly Hite, ‘Virginia Woolf’s Two Bodies’, Genders, 31 (2000) [http://www.genders.org/g31/g31_hite.html; accessed 16/05/2008].

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about gargantuan Teutonic appetites and Wagnerian mythical abstractions but the relation in which she puts herself to those ‘monster men and women’: We sat and watched the people in the park for an hour. My God, they are hideous! The women have a strap round their waists, a green hunting cap, with a feather, and short skirts. They are never fashionable. I dont cause any horror. [sic] We dined at the foreigners [sic] restaurant, and even there they are incredibly stout and garish. […] They eat enormously, off great joints, covered with fat.32

Dowdy and provincial these Germans may be but they nonetheless make Woolf, a notoriously meagre eater, a poor dresser and extremely self-conscious about her weight, inconspicuous.33 Woolf’s relief at her own invisibility reveals her disapproval of German dress and appetite as a displacement of her own corporeal anxieties. If her relief is based on an identification with this nonconformity to standards of physical norms or beauty (because they are so hideous she does not cause any horror), this similarity is swiftly disavowed. Like the hideous Germans, Woolf may have the potential to cause ‘horror’ through her own appearance but in her letters she fashions the detached stance of a foreigner identifiable by her lack of touristic consumption, or rather the critical attitude through which she distances herself from German culture, rejecting not just the Germans themselves but their food, their dress, their music, their language, even their countryside. For Woolf, enormous appetite equals embarrassing, excessive visibility, and the Germans’ carefree attitude to their own bodies seems most puzzling and grotesque to her. Describing the costumes and the seating arrangements in Bayreuth’s Festspielhaus, she moves from the familiar mocking remarks to a slightly more self-aware note. The passage is notable for the way in which the focus slides from the Wagnerian stage to the cosmopolitan audience in provincial Bayreuth to the English upper-middle classes: They dont [sic] do the thing as well as we do it, I think: our seats are very near, and the ugly creatures look still uglier. I can never quite get over the florid Teuton spirit, with its gross symbolism – and its flaxen tresses. Imagine a nightgown, with a pig tail on each shoulder, and watery eyes ogling heaven. […] There is a great crowd, and we get stared at, not for our beauty. Yesterday, a lean woman with a face like a ferret bowed to me, and looked familiar, but I cant [sic] think who she is – a Coltman, or a Bonham Carter, perhaps.34

  Woolf, Collected Letters, vol. 1, p. 403; my emphasis.  On the relationship between Woolf’s eating disorders and what her critics now assume to be sexual abuse by her half-brothers, see Roger Poole, The Unknown Virginia Woolf, Brighton, 1982, Chs 4, 8, 15. 34   Woolf, Collected Letters, vol. 1, p.407. 32 33

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It is the English who stare and for whom she is conspicuous, recognizable in the way one skinny Billy Goat (as she was known to Vanessa) vaguely greets another lean ferret. I am reminded here of Violet Hunt’s comment that ‘English selfindulgence would appear to take the form of malnutrition’. The Englishwoman whom Woolf cannot quite place is identifiable as English in her familiar leanness. The Germans on the stage, she implies, are too visible, too close up; her unease about visibility extends to the actresses: to be stared at is as offensive as being given an opportunity to stare. The way in which subject and object of the critical gaze shift in these letters speaks eloquently of Woolf’s discomfort about the body in general and her body in particular. Here is a third instance, in which the horror of ‘being stared at’ is phrased in terms of control and consumption: Oh my God, I must change now: it is very hot, and a great many fashionable women have arrived, who stare at me between the acts, and as my head was washed yesterday, my hair is unusually free. I haven’t seen one German woman who has a face; they are puddings of red dough.35

The train of thought is fascinating. Presumably the fashionable women cannot be German, so we must assume that Woolf’s discomfort at being the object of the scrutinizing female gaze is framed by her struggle with perspiration and ‘unusually free’ hair, her lack of control over her body and her appearance. Following this confession, however, positions shift in the first sentence of the next paragraph. Rather than remain the Englishwoman squirming under the gaze of her fashionable compatriots and struggling with her appearance, she denies German women any individuality and turns them into consumable objects of dubious taste and consistency. Because Germans like food they can be synecdochically reduced to the unpalatable dishes they eat. Katherine Mansfield, equally uneasy about her body and sexuality, resorted to precisely this strategy when talking about Lawrence’s German wife Frieda (‘that immense german [sic] Christmas pudding’) in her letters36 and in the representations of Germans in her collection In a German Pension (1911). Several stories explicitly link women, appetite and sexual desire. In ‘Germans at Meat’, ‘Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding’ and ‘At Lehmann’s’, women are literally reduced to consumable sexual objects at table or in places where food is consumed in a sexual economy that privileges men socially and economically.37 For Mansfield 35

 Ibid.   Katherine Mansfield, The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, ed. Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott, Oxford, 1984, vol.1, p. 267. 37   For analyses of eating and sexuality in Mansfield’s early work see Mary Burgan, Illness, Gender and Writing: The Case of Katherine Mansfield, Baltimore, 1994, pp. 68–89, and Patricia Moran, Word of Mouth: Body Language in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, Charlottesville, 1997, pp. 102,128–9. Burgan in particular forges links between 36

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as for Ford, it was much easier to talk about sex and the body if the body was foreign or sex took place abroad. In a German Pension is remarkable for the way it accumulates bodily functions as discourse – everybody is at the spa because of their malfunctioning, recuperating body, so talk and action unremittingly focus on corporeality. In this spa environment most bodily actions appear on the same level: sex and eating; perspiration and mastication; serving food and marrying; having babies and cooking. It was easy to mock Germans’ obsession with macrobiotics, physical culture, organized rambling, nudism and sunbathing, which all emerged before the Great War as quasi-medicinal, regenerative activities. They suggested unseemly pleasure in corporeal existence and while they were, on the whole, embedded in middle-class movements they suggested that the body could potentially be a classless entity. While Nacktkultur actually belonged to the various rehabilitating measures that both modernists and anti-modernists prescribed for the ailing corpus, overburdened by labour and intellectual endeavour, it was seen as a specifically German habitus to indulge in public nudity for health reasons.38 Regarding the bathing etiquette amongst Germans enjoying their annual remedial Badereise to the island of Rügen (a seaside holiday often standing in for a Kur), Elizabeth von Arnim observed that ‘the more clothes they take off the more do they seem to consider the last barrier between human creature and human creature broken down’ (95). The implication is that nudity might not only encourage inappropriate familiarity but erode established social hierarchies and morality. Mansfield’s ‘The Mansfield’s biographical struggles with the body (extramarital sex, pregnancy, miscarriage, veneral disease, illness) around the time of her stay at Bavarian Wörishofen in 1909 and shortly after, and her sceptical representation of motherhood in the German stories. More explicit in her critique of incessant childbirth as a dangerous national duty is Elizabeth von Arnim in The Pastor’s Wife (1914), a novel in which the English wife’s relatives are perturbed by the unseemly surfeit of German offspring – a reaction that indicates the Edwardian middle classes’ similar attitude to both the unwisely procreative working classes and foreigners. 38   According to Chad Ross, the movement flourished in the 1920s, but he locates its fractious beginnings around a few independent and eccentric individuals in Berlin and Southern Germany in the first decade of the twentieth century. Its leaders produced well-illustrated publications with scientific titles that underlined the medical discourses of social progress to which they saw themselves contributing. Heinrich Pudor issued a Katechismus der Nacktkultur: Leitfaden für Sonnenbäder und Nacktpflege (Catechism for Nudism: Handbook for Sunbathing and Care of the Naked Body; 1906) while his rival Richard Ungewitter published Nackt: Eine kritische Studie (Naked: A Critical Study; 1909). Nudist communities gave themselves such esoteric names as Lodge of Rising Life, League of Lightfriends and Hellas-Lodge to legitimize their activities as medicinal and classical. In urban areas lodge members seem to have rented empty apartments to enjoy communal nudity and presumably to escape public reprimand in a ‘club’ environment. The specifically medicinal purposes of indoor nudity do not seem to have been documented. See Naked Germany, Ch. 1.

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Luftbad’ suggests a similar argument. It mocks German health consciousness, macrobiotics, sunbathing and the endless discourse about corporeality, healthy or otherwise, but like Woolf’s anxious worry about the horror she might be causing, the narrator cannot help admitting her physical self-consciousness. In a fencedin enclave of nudists, being aware of her flawed body marks her out as ‘normal’ and reassuringly conventional (flawed bodies need appropriate covering-up so that they do not offend observing audiences) – unlike the ‘progressive’ Germans in various stages of exposure. Edwardian attitudes to German corporeal obsessions took on a more hostile note once the Beastly Hun had to be fought in the trenches. As we have seen in Chapter 3, during the First World War, with its hysterical propaganda and paranoid xenophobia, more liberal attitudes towards the body and sexuality would be construed as unpatriotic or pacifist, as if part of a decadent and perverse Hunnish erotomania infecting the British Isles. For Samuel Hynes the furore surrounding D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow was symptomatic of the Establishment’s reactionary response that linked avant-garde art and modern attitudes to sex.39 Yet Lawrence’s own scepticism of modernity perhaps even suggested this kind of reaction. Winifred Inger, the class-mistress with whom Ursula Brangwen shares a ‘queer awareness’ of physical pleasure in the chapter ‘Shame’, is described as a ‘clean type of modern girl whose very independence betrays her sorrow’. Seeing Miss Inger in a bathing costume, ‘firm bodied as Diana’, gives physical exercise a whole new meaning.40 Lesbian desire, phrased as a quasi-masculine appreciation of the female body, is tethered to ‘bad’ modernity, part of which is an apocalyptic female independence. Women’s physical intimacy in The Rainbow is literally shameful, deadening and sterile (as it would be in his later novella The Fox), while in Women in Love (1921) men can indulge in wrestling and find a masculine mythical communion that, when it does not come to pass at the end of the book, is a melancholic loss. Interestingly, Lawrence, whose representation of bodily pleasure roused the censors to outbursts of vilification only paralleled by Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, also needed German bodies and foreign climates to formulate his ideas about restorative heterosexuality and anxious modernity. Mechanical Men and German Efficiency: ‘The Perfect Inhuman Machine’ If the writers discussed so far expressed discomfort with German bodies essentially dominated by the pursuit of offensive, undisciplined, excessive or perverse pleasure, one would imagine that a writer like D.H. Lawrence could borrow from this discourse for his evolution of a remedial heterosexuality that reclaims the body for a lost, ‘organic’ way of life. Indeed the beginning of Lady Chatterley’s  Hynes, A War Imagined, pp. 17, 60ff.  D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Jan Hewitt, London, 1993, pp. 317–9.

39 40

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Lover (1928) does this in a rather straightforward way, sending the Reid sisters to Germany to study music and immerse themselves in student culture and a whole range of cultural and political movements, from socialism to the Wandervogel movement. Modern Germany affords them an unprecedented freedom – ‘free’ and ‘freedom’ are mentioned eleven times in three pages – whose pleasures include both ‘the love connexion’ and discursive freedom about sex, art and politics: ‘no one was abashed’.41 The earliest version of the novel, The First Lady Chatterley, formulates a more concise link between Constance’s education in Germany and her brooding modernity. What she experiences in Germany is sexual and discursive freedom, both of which give her a ‘thrill’. Lawrence is very careful not to blame Germany for Constance’s sexual deprivations. Instead, he emphasizes ‘the bitter, heavy irony’ that the country that thrilled her intellectually and sexually also robbed her of fulfilment with a veteran husband who goes on reading Hauptmann, Spengler and Rilke (18). While the first version of the novel sees men on both sides as the victims of ‘the huge machine’ of war and ‘war patriotism’ (18), the final version shifts focus away from the destructive war machine that deprives of pleasure and towards the detailed sexual experiences pre-war Germany offers both Constance and her sister Hilda. The revision, in other words, no longer comments on the irony with which destructive machines and sexual bodies interrelate, but expands Lawrence’s vision of fulfilment through a heterosexual union still anchored in and hampered by the social realities of class but seemingly independent of impulses of modernity. Mellors and Constance are Lawrence’s version of a future that restores the body through sex rather than through machines. These revisions are a compressed version of the way in which Lawrence’s critique of modernity evolved through a vocabulary of bodies and machines articulated in a cluster of texts written around the time of the First World War. I would like to trace this development from the final stories in the ‘Prussian Officer’ collection to Women in Love, his most extensive treatment of ‘bad’, disembodied modernity as a German discourse of pleasurable but dehumanizing mechanics. For Lawrence, industrial and scientific developments had propelled the world in a direction that divorced them from their bodies, or reduced their bodies to industrial tools. Increasingly he seems to be searching for the mythical restoration of the soul through corporeal experiences unconditioned by capitalist modernity. He endorses modernity only in so far as it invokes or reclaims organic, preindustrial states of being, as in the early German scenes in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. When he observes German youths of the Wandervogel movement in Italy, he sees them as fundamentally different from contemporary bourgeois German tourists, reminiscent of i barbari as well as harbingers of a new age: ‘They would bring that sense of remote far-off lands […] and that sense of mysterious,

41  D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Harmondsworth, 1960, pp. 6, 7. All subsequent references to this edition are cited parenthetically in the text.

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unfathomable purpose’ – ‘wild strangers from the north’; ‘forerunners of another world of men’.42 In ‘The Thorn in the Flesh’ and ‘The Prussian Officer’, ‘mechanical’ is the adjective repeatedly used for the way in which militarism alienates the soul from the body, reducing the latter to robotic action. Both are stories about physical and mental duress in which the protagonists die but not until they have reclaimed their bodies and their spiritual integrity through redemptive sexual or quasi-sexual consummation. Private Bachmann in ‘The Thorn in the Flesh’ marches with a body ‘worked by a kind of mechanical intelligence’, ordered about by an officer who regards him ‘as a mechanical thing’ amongst fellow soldiers who obey orders with a ‘blank mechanical look’ (181–3). Bachmann’s vertigo, his loss of control over his bladder, his sudden violence against the overbearing officer and above all his later sexual union with a village maid progressively restore his body to him. Similarly, in ‘The Prussian Officer’, the Bavarian orderly has to be bullied into ‘mechanical obedience’ by his Prussian captain who, himself ‘rigid’, ‘tense’, ‘impervious’ and ‘unliving’, torments the instinctual life out of the lithe Bavarian until he becomes as ‘stiff’ as his superior (202, 204, 214). Paradoxically, the climactic death scenes in the story dramatize the body as coming alive, out of a mechanical stupor of order and obedience into a purely physical existence. Only when his servant strangles him is the officer most animated, his body trembling even after his neck has been broken in an almost post-coital shudder. The agony of the servant, stumbling exhausted and dehydrated through the alpine landscape to escape punishment, turns into a hallucinatory, expressionist dream in which bodily sensations are foregrounded and heightened. While these stories have been read as a critique of German militarism and its negation or perversion of sexuality,43 Lawrence’s comments in an article in the Manchester Guardian shortly after the outbreak of war suggest a broader critique of militarism as a symptom of the modern age of technology that threatened to force apart body and spirit, depriving men and women of an organic, instinctual corporeal existence. Having observed military exercises in Bavaria in 1913, he realized that war would be ‘an affair entirely of machines, with men attached to the machines as the subordinate part thereof, as the butt is the part of a rifle’.44 War was merely the most criminal version of modern mass mechanization.45 In ‘England, My England’, Lawrence’s narrator finally equates German militarism with British 42  D.H. Lawrence, ‘Germans and Latins’, in Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D.H. Lawrence, ed. Edward D. Macdonald, London, 1967, pp. 128–30. 43   See for example Howard J. Booth, ‘Lawrence in Doubt: a Theory of the “Other” and its Collapse’, in Howard J. Booth and Nigel Rigby (eds), Modernism and Empire, Manchester, 2000, pp. 196–223, at p. 202. 44  D.H. Lawrence, ‘With the Guns’, in The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, ed. Antony Atkins, Oxford, 1995, p. 246. 45   Trudi Tate has argued that Lawrence’s representation of soldiers markedly differs from those of his contemporaries who focus on maimed or shell-shocked soldiers whereas

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industrialism, in a critique keenly attuned to imperialist-capitalist rhetoric (‘the conquests of peace’) and the mechanisms of group dynamics (‘the mob-spirit of a democratic army’).46 In this story the protagonist is physically destroyed on the battlefield by an exploding shell, but this is merely the culmination of a spectral pre-war life lived in bad faith, a slow dying of modernity. As I have demonstrated in Chapters 2 and 3, for many British writers, politicians and intellectuals Germany came to stand for a ‘bad’ modernity before and during the war, and for an identification of modernity with foreign influences and cosmopolitanism that would eventually construct the war as a conflict of stable conservatism versus dangerous foreign modernity.47 Although the war is never mentioned in Women in Love (1920), it informs the novel’s apocalyptic mood. Graham Holderness argues that Lawrence’s novel challenges as hypocritical the ideological position England claimed in her opposition to Germany during the First World War.48 The novel certainly mobilizes ideas and practices clearly identified as German, from Goethe to Nietzsche, from Wagner to Bismarck49, and some of these furnish a critique of modernity that Lawrence deploys in order to point out a specifically English problem with physical pleasure. Women in Love frames its attack on ‘bad’ modernity largely through the two men between whom Gudrun Brangwen must ultimately choose, the industrialist Gerald Crich and the sculptor Loerke. Both represent modernity’s dead end through technological progress and art’s collaboration with it. Yet their positions towards machines, bodies and, above all, pleasure are radically different. The industrial magnate Gerald Crich is the embodiment of a Nietzschean will to power, a Nordic hero of capitalism, tall, blond and blue-eyed with a propensity to dominate horses, rabbits and women. Characterized as an industrial Siegfried and trained at German universities, Gerald enforces a ruthless reform process in his ailing father’s mining complex that enables him to exploit difficult resources and maximize profits. The old paternalistic system is superseded by a foreign modernity that acknowledges Britain’s fiercest rivals at the time, the USA and Germany. Gerald’s new machines are US-made and this reorganization of the company suggests a lexical register most frequently associated with Germany, utilizing ‘expert engineers’, ‘educated and expert men’ for economical, ‘efficient’ management according to ‘the most

Lawrence’s military men, even if they return blind or paralysed, retain their sanity. See Modernism, History and the First World War, Manchester, 1998, pp. 102ff. 46  D.H. Lawrence, The Collected Short Stories, London, 1974, p. 308. 47   See Eksteins, Rites of Spring, p. 172. 48  Graham Holderness, D.H. Lawrence: History, Ideology, Fiction, Dublin, 1982, p. 208. 49   For a more comprehensive tracing of German ideas and influences on Lawrence’s œuvre see Karl Krockel, D.H. Lawrence and Germany: The Politics of Influence, Amsterdam, 2007.

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accurate and delicate scientific method’.50 For a conservative like John Buchan, the engineer was still a symbol of decency, a foreign model that could be successfully assimilated. The railway engineer Gaudian in Greenmantle and The Three Hostages is a good German precisely because he combines German expertise with English virtues and puts them into the service of imperial ideology and patriotism. In Wells’s more pessimistic universe, the demise of the engineer-narrator in TonoBungay from building gliding machines to destroyers signals the way in which technology, power and capitalism always collude in the worst possible way. Lawrence’s engineers, too, are the agents of a dehumanizing modernity. If Tom Brangwen in The Rainbow is merely perverse, Gerald Crich in Women in Love symbolizes the way in which this mechanical perversion has been normalized through modern progress, which before the war is increasingly identified as imported: ‘We are getting Germanised or Americanised or automobilised or electrified’ (326), diagnosed Ford in The Spirit of the People.51 This assimilated foreign modernity brings about ‘the substitution of the mechanical principle for the organic’ (304, 305). In this phrasing Lawrence anticipates Oswald Spengler’s cultural analysis, in Man and Technics (1932), that All things organic are dying in the grip of organisation. An artificial world is permeating and poisoning the natural. The Civilization itself has become a machine that does, or tries to do, everything in mechanical fashion. We think only in horse-power now; we cannot look at a waterfall without mentally turning it into electric power; we cannot survey a countryside full of pasturing cattle without thinking of its exploitation as a source of meat-supply.52

This conversion process from the pre-industrial, picturesque and ‘natural’ organic to the mechanical way of thinking characterizes Crich’s relation to his economic empire; more importantly, this mechanical fashion has converted him into an integral part of the divine machine. Believing himself the ‘God of the machine’ as his motor car (that universal harbinger of progress) crawls through the sooty masses of miners in the hamlets, Gerald focuses on ‘the pure instrumentality of mankind’ (295) as a rationalization for capitalist power structures: it was like being part of a machine. He himself happened to be a controlling, central part, the masses of men were the parts variously controlled […] He merely represented the miners in a higher sense when he perceived that the only way to fulfil perfectly the will of man was to establish the perfect inhuman machine. (300, 304) 50  D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. Charles L. Ross, Harmondsworth, 1989, pp. 302–4. All subsequent references to this edition are cited parenthetically in the text. 51  See also Parrinder, ‘All That is Solid Melts into Air’, p. 11. 52  Oswald Spengler, Man and Technics, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson, London, 1963, p. 94.

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The result of this inhuman machine is that the miners have to work harder than before and submit to a new order, ‘heartbreaking in its mindlessness […] but satisfying in its very destructiveness’ (304). In this cybernetic machine world, joy does not just disappear from the submissive miners’ lives by conversion into an entropic satisfaction.53 The perfect inhuman machine he has created includes an inbuilt obsolescence for its owner who is consequently subject to bouts of anxiety: ‘He was afraid that one day he would break down and be a purely meaningless bubble lapping around in darkness’ (306). Lawrence’s phrasing has taken some inspiration from Wells’s Tono-Bungay, whose abject narrator sees High Capitalism and modern commodity culture as symptoms of ‘progress’. In the end, human endeavour through machines and financial universes is insubstantial and chimerical: The whole of this modern mercantile investing civilization is indeed such stuff as dreams are made of. A mass of people swelters and toils, great railway systems grow, cities arise to the skies and spread wide and far, mines are opened, factories hum, foundries roar, ships plough the seas, countries are settled; about this busy striving world the right owners go, controlling all, enjoying all, confident and creating the confidence that draws us all together into a reluctant, nearly unconscious brotherhood. I wonder and plan my engines. The flags flutter, the crowds cheer, the legislatures meet. Yet it seems to me indeed at times that all this present commercial civilization is no more than my poor uncle’s career writ large, a swelling thinning bubble of assurances; that its arithmetic is just as unsound, its dividends as ill-advised, its ultimate aim as vague and forgotten; that it all drifts on perhaps to some tremendous parallel to his individual disaster… (221–2.)

For Wells the ‘bubble’ is a simile not just for the fraudulent commercial enterprise that can be temporarily successful in a world that functions through an almost universal, hypnotic acquiescence with capitalism: unconscious brotherhoods, cheering crowds, toiling masses. High Capitalist society, Wells’s mercantile civilization, is a fraud. While Wells focuses on systemic and ideological flaws, Lawrence’s critique points to the spiritual consequences. For him, the ‘bubble’ is an existential void, the symbol of anxiety arising from being assimilated by an entropic mechanical universe that forces its elements to ‘break down’. Even if Crich finds dissipation in casual sex from such horror vacui, Lawrence clearly characterizes him as an agent of entropy, an importer of a foreign modernity that alienates everyone in the system from their humanity – their bodies, their ‘joy’ and their ‘satisfactory relief’. There is no pleasure to be had in this universe of 53

  In her reading of the novel Celia McLean sees Loerke as an entropic artist; my interpretation argues that Crich and Loerke are merely different versions of entropy. Celia McLean, ‘The Entropic Artist: Loerke’s Theories of Art in Women in Love’, D.H. Lawrence Review, 20/3 (1988): 275–86.

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inhuman machines because fulfilling pleasure is too human – the non-fulfilling sex Lawrence describes in Lady Chatterley’s Lover is sex as mere orgasmic technique, as mechanical friction. Gerald’s reform programme sets up a corporate ideology based on the body as machine – and the machine as body. Taylorism, rationalization and the fragmentation of contemporary manufacturing processes at the conveyor belt might well have merited the metaphor of the inhuman machine for a changing socioeconomic system. As Mark Seltzer demonstrates in Bodies and Machines, late nineteenth-century writing was profoundly occupied with the relationship between new modes of production and consumption, staging conflicts or altering the boundaries between the animate and the inanimate, between bodies and machines. Early twentieth-century medical and health culture increasingly thought of the body as a ‘human machine’ that required regular maintenance, expert advice and educated management in order to function efficiently. British culture, however, utilized the machine metaphor in order not to talk about the body, and certainly not about pleasure. In his remarkable The Engines of the Human Body (1919) the anatomist and anthropologist Arthur Keith spoke of instructing boys and girls about ‘the machinery of their own bodies’ – this was about imparting necessary knowledge for physical maintenance under the remit of preventive pedagogy.54 Keith ran riot with mechanical comparisons: bones became levers, the nerves were a telephone exchange, the metabolism was likened to a factory and so on. Yet no mention was made of the reproductive system or indeed of such an unmechanical concept as desire. Initially Keith’s book was delivered as a series of Christmas lectures in 1916–17 at the Royal Institution, at a time when ‘more than a million human machines, all of them made in Britain or in British colonies, were fighting grimly and freely giving their lives in foreign lands’.55 In this alarming rhetoric, inanimate and animate matter are completely blurred. Men are reduced to machines, with supposedly human qualities like determination and free will merely part of that national manufacturer’s guarantee ‘made in Britain’.56 Surely there is no real difference here between Crich’s ‘perfect inhuman machine’ and the human machines that Keith’s lectures lubricate into efficient entropy. The target, it seems, is to avoid the debacle of the Second Boer War with its C3 rejects rather than educate a new generation into self-knowledge beyond corporeal efficiency. In its omission, desire seems an unmentionable luxury, a silent and disruptive agent, a superfluous side effect, perhaps even a malfunction. In The Human Machine (1913) Arnold Bennett complained that the English were still ‘amateurs in the art of living’ and compared man to an automobile (a popular machine, if ever there was one). Directing attention to the body as a whole, he ‘considered [it] as a machine, complex and capable of quite extraordinary  Arthur Keith, The Engines of the Human Body, London, 1919, p. 3.  Ibid. 56  Since conscription was introduced in Britain in February 1916 no one was giving his life freely any more either. 54

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efficiency, for travelling smoothly through the world, in any desired manner, with satisfaction not only to himself but to the people he meets en route, and the people who are overtaking him and whom he is overtaking’.57 Yet it became increasingly difficult to conceive of the ‘whole’ body as an organic unity without some sort of prosthesis: soon the First World War would make visible a horrendous scale of maimed and mutilated masculinity58 while cosmetic consumer advertising continued to focus on body parts that highlighted deficiencies while also claiming to remedy them. As Tim Armstrong argues in Modernism, Technology and the Body, consumer culture projected and endlessly deferred the ‘whole’ body as a desirable result of technology.59 Moreover, modern manufacturing processes that had fragmented production into distinct work operations did not even need ‘whole’ bodies any more. When Henry Ford analysed the production of his Model T (begun in 1908), he found that only 12 per cent of the 7,882 operations required able-bodied men while 670 could be filled by legless men, 2,637 by one-legged men, two by armless men and ten by blind men.60 It didn’t take a Lawrentian war machine to dismember men; modern factories did the same. It is one of the paradoxes of ‘progress’ that the eugenics movement seemed preoccupied with imperial defence and national economic performance but took little account of the fact that modern manufacturing (which forms the basis of working-class employment) increasingly dispensed with the human body, whether that body was regenerated or degenerate. Whole cars could be made by partial men until, later in the century, they would eventually be assembled by robots, who are not mechanical reproductions of whole men but merely machine synecdoches for strictly required functions. Body maintenance, let alone restoration, required ‘educated and expert men’ like dieticians and nutritionists who in turn adopted the language of engineers. The Hygiene exhibitions in Düsseldorf and Dresden in 1926, 1930 and 1931 attracted mass audiences because they interpreted the human body as a machine and attempted to visualize its operational procedures and malfunctions through illuminated displays and, famously, the first transparent model of a human body: der gläserne Mensch.61 Fritz Kahn’s ingenious poster ‘Man as an Industrial Palace’ (Fig. 5.1) figures respiratory and digestive organs as parts of a complex machine that is organized like a factory, combining specialized technological and mechanical processes from mining, building and petrochemical industries without abandoning a class-specific division of labour that leaves metabolic workers busy with conveyor belts, distilling apparatuses, pressure gauges, filters, hydraulic pumps and engines while the management of these processes is given to professionals:  Arnold Bennett, The Human Machine, London, 1913, pp. 16–18.   See for instance Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War, London, 1996, pp. 31–76. 59  Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology and the Body, Cambridge, 1998, p. 100. 60   Cited in Mark Seltzer, Bodies and Machines, London, 1992, p. 157. 61  See Hau, Cult of Health, pp. 139–43. 57 58

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engineers, managers and scientists. Kahn’s visualization of the human machine does not so much apply industrial processes to the human body as take the body as the originative model for industry, a contemporary view particularly prevalent in Germany, amongst both artists and industrialists.62 Michael Hau’s The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany cites industrialists such as Karl August Linger (owner of the Odol mouthwash company) and his book Der Mensch als Organisationsvorbild (Man as a Model for Organization; 1914) as indicative of contemporary analogies between the human body and technology.63 In the US, German-born biologist Jacques Loeb collapsed the distinction between inorganic and organic processes in The Mechanistic Conception of Life (1912). In complete opposition to a writer like Lawrence, Loeb, Linger and Kahn justify industrial development as a natural evolution from and an extension of familiar, organic processes that already incorporate mechanical elements. For them, technology does not merely provide a prosthesis for the human body, but is already an integral part of humanity. If the body is a machine, then machines are merely highly visible, mechanical bodies – ‘iron men’ as Crich’s miners call the cutting machines (304) – and men working with machines thereby become part of an organic, homogeneous industrial complex. The elevation of this complex to a palace in Kahn’s poster takes us on to the artist Loerke in Women in Love, whose aesthetics clearly stand in the service of industry rather than voice Lawrence’s cultural scepticism: ‘since industry is our business, now, then let us make our places of industry our art – our factory-area our Parthenon’ (518). There are overtones here of the German Werkbund movement, an association of artists, craftsmen and architects working to forge a dialogue between industry and art based on contemporary integrative models rather than the nineteenth-century concept of instrumentalized labour and individualized art.64 Loerke’s current project is a granite bas-relief for a factory. In this interpretation of industry, man fulfils the counterpart of labour: ‘the machine works him, instead of he the machine. He enjoys the mechanical motion, in his own body’ (519). Although Loerke’s frieze is devoid of both machines and labour, it represents a pre-industrial carnivalesque fair of peasants and artisans enjoying a ‘frenzy of chaotic motion’ (517). His version of industry, then, forges a continuum of motion as a mechanical act that pleasurably originates in the body but is then developed 62

  Kahn’s vision is perhaps also the product of Germany’s love affair with American models of industry and efficiency, notably Fordism and Taylorization, in the 1920s. As Mary Nolan has argued in Visions of Modernity, Germany’s American vision of modernity (just as Britain’s German vision of modernity) met with a great deal of ambivalence about the social and cultural costs of rationalization but it was clearly a symptom of the radical orientation towards the future that characterized both Weimar Germany and the Third Reich. See also Herf, Reactionary Modernism. 63  Hau, Cult of Health, pp. 142–3. 64  See Frederic J. Schwartz, The Werkbund: Design Theory and Mass Culture Before the First World War, New Haven, 1996.

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Figure 5.1

Fritz Kahn, Der Mensch als Industriepalast (c.1930)

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and organized into labour, craft, art and industry. Ultimately both the body and the machine produce pleasure through work, through mechanical processes, and it is the artist’s task in the interpretation of industry to externalize the aesthetics of work: ‘machinery and the acts of labour are extremely, maddeningly beautiful’. This model is similar to Kahn’s: machine and body are simply different manifestations of the same aestheticized mechanical principle. Both Loerke and Crich embrace a philosophy that subjugates the body to the purpose of work, whether work is industrial or artistic production, and neither acknowledges the ideological, materialist or even socioeconomic context in which production takes place. Loerke’s art developed from factory work, as if making models were a logical evolution from stamping clay bottles. His frieze is an indication of the fact that his art has never really left the factory behind. Work, for Loerke, is ‘serving a machine, or enjoying the motion of a machine’ (519), and there is ‘Nothing but work!’ Yet the difference between Crich and Loerke is how their machine-work relates to pleasure. Gerald only seems to have sex when he has become ‘part of the machine’ to such an extent that this fusion has split off desire as a waste product, extrinsic to his functioning. The reason why Gudrun ultimately rejects him is because she cannot bear a Fordist ‘slumber of constant repetition’, a life measured in wheelbarrow units or segments of locked time. Being with Gerald, having sex with Gerald is a cybernetic fusion in which she becomes part of the perfect inhuman machine: Oh, god, the wheels within wheels of people, it makes one’s head tick like a clock, with a very madness of dead mechanical monotony and meaninglessness. […] All life, all life resolved into this: tick-tack, tick-tack, tick-tack; then the striking of the hour; then the tick-tack, tick-tack, and the twitching of the clockfingers. Gerald could not save her from it. He, his body, his motion, his life – it was the same ticking, the same twitching across the dial, a horrible mechanical twitching forward over the face of the hours. What were his kisses, his embraces. She could hear their tick-tack, tick-tack. (566; 564)

What for Crich might be the perfect inhuman sex is a grotesque union for Gudrun: the boundaries between man and timepiece are blurred, just as in Lady Chatterley’s Lover Clifford’s impotent lower body strangely merges with his motorized wheelchair. While in Women in Love machine sex is still available, the later novel uses the machine metaphor to indicate the impossibility of sex. The choice for Gudrun between Crich and Loerke is one between the bohemian German avant-garde and middle-class anglicized efficiency. Yet Loerke only relates to women insofar as they can be of use for his art, which requires adolescents that are beaten into maintaining the required poses. He treats his models the way Crich subjugates his workers, subjecting individual bodies to mechanical principles without any regard for the social reality of their existence. At first glance, there is a distinct parallel between the photogravure of Loerke’s statuette of a naked young girl sitting sideways on a massive stallion and Crich’s forcing his mare

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into submission before a bypassing train. Loerke’s horse dominates the girl, Crich dominates his horse (and is consequently admired by Gudrun). Yet Gudrun’s sister soon identifies the artefact as the product of a hackneyed bohemian sexual liaison. In this sense, his artwork is reduced to a type or, literally, a cliché, infinitely reproducible just as the photogravure is a mere visual reproduction of the ‘original’ statue. Loerke’s art is work as instrumentalized pleasure, sordid, egotistical, perverse, or carnivalesque and communal. The hybrid Werkbund concept of striving to reconcile art and industry is problematical for Lawrence, and hence Loerke is characterized from the start as grotesque: in his comedy of regional accents; through a diminutive pre-sexual body, as a puny ‘mud-child’ with uncanny eyes, a misshapen golem inhabiting a mythical underworld, a ‘troll’ in ‘a simple loden suit, with knee breeches’. He is repeatedly likened to a rabbit, a bat, a rat, a flea, an elf until he becomes, in the climactic struggle in the snowy landscape, an Alberich to Gerald’s Siegfried (516, 521, 568). Loerke himself sees the grotesque in art as a form that resembles ‘a confusion in nature’, holding a tension between what for Lawrence are irreconcilable opposites – the primitive corporeal and the mechanical motion (546). In its overdetermined hybridity, Loerke’s physique is perhaps the best representation of the grotesque as a ‘confusion’. He is ‘the little German sculptor’ but also a pure-bred street Arab (516) and a Jew from Polish Austria. That the narrative slides into the mythical in scenes of intense corporeality, as in the wrestling scene between Birkin and Crich or the apocalyptic strangling scene, is an indication of the urgency Lawrence places on his vision of regeneration as well as a symptom of contemporary notions of literary propriety. But with Loerke, Gudrun and Crich in the snow one can’t quite help being reminded of the florid Teutonic taste that Virginia Woolf found so risible in Bayreuth’s choreography and scene setting. Crich ends up frozen stiff in a Tyrolean morgue, a heterosexual variation on the motifs in ‘The Prussian Officer’, where both soldiers are ‘laid rigidly at rest’ as corpses in a morgue (222). As the mechanical man, Crich is a Prussian officer in the guise of an English coalmining magnate, perfectly rendered in his robotic inhumanity as a corpse. English responses to German corporeality displace cultural anxieties about dangerous modernities, about the body as a site for consumption and (re)production, and about sex and economic deficiency. In talking about the Germans and the German body, then, the English often talk about their own national body. That, too, according to Lawrence, is a German trait: ‘the Teutonic mind […] is always thinking in terms of somebody else’s experience, and almost never in terms of its own experience’.65 However, his own work after Women in Love and its reception, charts a real impasse about sex, pleasure and the English body. Mr Noon contrasts English provincialism with German promiscuity but the protagonist can only realize his sexual pleasure abroad and with a German. Gilbert Noon feels himself

65  Lawrence, ‘Germans and Latins’, in Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D.H. Lawrence, p. 131.

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‘unEnglished’ in the light of the ‘vast patchwork of Europe’ that spatially unfolds before his eyes from his central European vantage point: For the first time he saw England from the outside: tiny, she seemed, and tight, and so partial. Such a little bit among the vast rest. Whereas till now she had seemed all-in-all in herself. Now he knew it was not so. Her all-in-allness was a delusion of her natives. Her marvellous truths and standards and ideals were just local, not universal. They were just a piece of local pattern, in what was really a vast, complicated, far-reaching design.66

Lawrence abandoned Mr Noon in 1920, disheartened by the hostile reception of The Rainbow and Women in Love. Only the ‘English’ first part was published, posthumously in 1934. The German part might have had some residual influence on the first pages of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. It is one of the ironies of Lawrence’s effort that his most daring novel is set in England when he had long resigned himself to a permanent exile from the tightness of local patterns. Banned as obscene, the novel found no audience: the English body simply could not be represented as experiencing or giving sexual pleasure. Lawrence might have solved the problem of ‘telling the truth about my own experiences as a body’ which Woolf in 1931 still struggled with – but no one was listening. Pleasure remained a foreign concept. In the 1930s British observers of the new fascist body hoped that, if corporeal pleasure could not be had or imported, maybe adopting German regeneration was as close as they would get to it.

 D.H. Lawrence, Mr Noon, ed. Lindeth Vasey, London 1986, p. 135.

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Chapter 6

‘The Soldiers of Modernism’ The Lure of Fascist Corporeality in Travel Writing and Fiction

The bodies of young Germany are slim and golden-brown and muscular: they are fine machines, and well cared for. In the baths and stadiums of the cities, over all natural lakes and rivers, you may see them. And when you see them beside the bodies of old Germany, you realise what Germany has won. These beautiful bodies are the soldiers of modernism. In England too I think the new soldiers are stirring […]. Anthony Bertram, Pavements and Peaks

The ‘fine machines’ that impressed the writer and art historian Anthony Bertram, on his tour through Germany and Austria in 1931, seemed to be the result of a spectacular metamorphosis of a war-torn economy and a humiliated nation into an advanced, self-confident modern state. Bertram’s ‘soldiers of modernism’ no longer refer to Prussian militarism but evoke a futuristic Nazi Germany as a national body ascendant and beautiful. Bertram’s phenomenology of the German future – bodies as fine machines – takes avant-garde aesthetics as the combined result of political change and technological progress. The myth of national rebirth or palingenesis, which the Nazis themselves deployed in the slogan ‘Deutschland erwache!’ (Germany Awake!), was often taken up by foreign observers with epithets like ‘new’, ‘young’ or ‘modern’. In fact, the metaphor most frequently used for Germany, particularly after the Nazis had implemented some of their policies in the early 1930s, was that of regeneration, of a phoenix risen from the ashes. Even critical travelogues about Germany applauded the sheer – apparent – scale of social and economic achievements and its cult of youth and physical fitness. Fascist Germany strove for an image of cleanliness, efficiency and order all employed for the progress, health and spirit of the nation. Just as modern technology was embraced to further socioeconomic progress so the body was harnessed to a racial Volksgemeinschaft in the service of the greater national good.  Anthony Bertram, Pavements and Peaks, London, 1933, p. 70.  See for instance Cicely Hamilton’s three editions of Modern Germanies; as Seen by an Englishwoman, London, 1931, 1933 and 1937, the last two editions with updated postscripts on the Nazi regime. See also Michael Fry, Hitler’s Wonderland, London, 1934. ‘Germany Re-Arisen’, proclaimed Randolph Hughes in the first issue of The Anglo-German Review, 1/1 (1936): 10.  

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Bertram’s endorsement of corporeal modernity ignores the reactionary elements that underlie Nazi ideology and forge a romanticized, contradictory amalgam of modernity and ancient ritual. When Bertram imagined these soldiers of modernism stirring in England, he may have had in mind the increasingly popular physical culture movement as a harbinger of renewal. Could the fascist body be achieved without fascist ideology? This naive flirtation with fascist phenomenology is by no means atypical of 1930s British culture when, before war and Holocaust, discussions about the national future involved comparisons with alternative ideologies, notably the communist Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Glowing reports about Hitler’s wonderland tell us less about the realities of Nazi Germany than about the desires and anxieties of the English observer irrespective of their precise political affiliation. After the First World War, Britain developed a more inward-looking culture in which men tended towards the domesticated, quiet and reticent. As Sonya O. Rose has argued, by the outbreak of war in 1939 this conservative middle-class vision of hegemonic masculinity would have to be rearticulated as a form of ‘temperate’ masculinity deliberately set against effeminate pacifism on the one hand and aggressive Nazi manhood on the other. The delicate wartime negotiation of gender constructs, however, does not conclusively explain the earlier attraction of fascist corporeality for both Nazi sympathizers and detractors. The lure of fascist corporeality had less to do with particular physical features than with the symbolic    Powerful anti-fascist dystopias published in the late 1930s astutely diagnosed how thin the line could be between ‘foreign’ totalitarianism and home-grown conservative democracy; how permeable the boundaries between fascist ultra-nationalism and imperialist patriotism: Katherine Burdekin’s Swastika Night (1937), Storm Jameson’s In the Second Year (1938) and Ruthven Todd’s Over the Mountain (1939) all imagined England taken over by or given over to fascism. In the US, Nathaniel West’s A Cool Million (1934) and Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here (1935) sounded similar warnings.    For political and ideological readings of some of the texts discussed here see Richard Griffiths, Fellow Travellers of the Right: British Enthusiasts for Nazi Germany 1933–9, London, 1980. Angela Schwarz, Die Reise ins Dritte Reich. Britische Augenzeugen im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland (1933–1939), Göttingen, 1993. Dan Stone, Responses to Nazism in Britain, 1933–1939: Before War and Holocaust, Houndmills, 2003.   Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars, London, 1992, p. 210.   Sonya O. Rose, Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in Britain 1939–1945, Manchester, 2004, pp. 151–97.    While Julie Gottlieb may be right in dismissing Oswald Mosley’s and the BUF’s propaganda of palingenetic masculinity as unsuitable or even laughable for British political life, the point here is that not all observers of fascism took its spectacular machismo quite as literally as the BUF; for many it was a model that required adaptation to, rather than imitation in, British cultural life. Julie V. Gottlieb, ‘Britain’s New Fascist Men: The Aestheticisation of Brutality in British Fascist Propaganda’, in Julie V. Gottlieb & Thomas P. Linehan (eds), The Culture of Fascism: Visions of the Far Right in Britain, London, 2004, pp. 83–100.

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value of fascist masculinity; its function within a palingenetic myth in the service of an ultra-nationalist ideology. In other words, while foreign observers noticed what the fascist body beautiful looked like, they responded to what it represented: vital strength and fitness, ethnic homogeneity, virility, sense of duty, sacrifice and purpose, order and discipline. It is this symbolic value of the German future that invoked the British imperial past and thus a British desire for palingenesis. Conspicuous in travel writing, reportage and 1930s fiction about Germany are passages that dramatize the body as susceptible to ‘fascist contagion’. The encounter with the fascist body, whether directly or as a spectacle, does not seem to leave the English visitor untouched in his or her own corporeality. Foreign correspondents’ reports, travelogues and fictional travellers’ experiences tell of curious bodily phenomena which suggest that the English body could be Nazified through fascist aesthetics and cultural practice. At the very least it could be animated – however unconsciously – to participate in Nazi aesthetics. This is a notable feature in accounts of border crossings and party rallies, and in the only major 1930s English-language novels set in Germany, Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin novels Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939) as well as Stevie Smith’s spy fantasy Over the Frontier (1938). Neither Smith nor Isherwood supported fascism or demonstrated a proto-fascist stance but their novels’ highly self-conscious narrators rely on traditional notions of Englishness to establish a clear boundary between political and moral values in Germany and in England.10 The Anglo-Saxon character, however, turns out to be a rather weak defence against the seductions of fascism, let alone sufficiently distinct from Germanness. This instability of national categories underlies the way in which the fascist body beautiful is deployed in fictional sadomasochistic fantasies with imperialist connotations. Alternatively, that body articulates, by dint of a uniform, uniform desires in British and German imperialism. English responses to Nazi Germany therefore appear to reveal a growing ambivalence about empire: a

  On the Nazi construction of palingenetic myths see Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism, London, 1993, pp. 32–6.   The host of contemporary novels that directly deal with fascist Germany or that are set in Germany or Austria show little attention to the correspondences between Britsh imperialism and Nazi Germany, possibly because their publication date falls into wartime when such ideological similarities are increasingly ignored: Nicholas Blake’s (Cecil Day Lewis’s) The Smiler with a Knife (1939), Rex Warner’s The Professor (1938), Phyllis Bottome’s The Mortal Storm (1942), Nancy Mitford’s Pigeon Pie (1940). For an extensive analysis of the period’s writing see Andy Croft, Red Letter Days: British Fiction in the 1930s, London, 1990. 10  On the proximity of modernism and fascism see John Harrison, The Reactionaries, London, 1966. John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939, London, 1992. Andrew Hewitt, Fascist Modernism. Charles Ferrall, Modernist Writing and Reactionary Politics. Laura Frost, Sex Drives. 

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longing for the traditions of superiority as well as a desire to be relieved of its attendant burden. The Fascist Body Beautiful and Imperial Nostalgia For cultural historians and literary critics, the 1930s in Britain are often a decade of division and uncertainty, even downright confusion about the problems facing the nation and the way in which they ought to be tackled. Underneath and alongside the orthodoxies of the left and right that furnish the ideological affiliations (if not always the actions) of the intellectual avant-garde there might also slumber considerable political indifference amongst the middle classes.11 What many English observers saw in Germany unconsciously reminded them of the familiar virtues of the British Empire, a belief in cultural, racial and moral superiority, not as clearly and aggressively articulated as by the Nazis but nonetheless related to ‘the Aryan principle’ of racial superiority.12 Throughout the 1920s and 30s, the empire had been struggling with racial frictions, rebellions and civil unrest in Ireland, India, Palestine, Australia and the West Indies, and intellectuals responded to these crises by beginning to question British imperialism, notably in Forster’s A Passage to India (1924), W. Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil (1925), Orwell’s Burmese Days (1934) and Joyce Cary’s Mr Johnson (1939). While the empire might have been ‘educationally unfashionable’ by the 1930s and its contemporaneous historiography in denial of some of the more violent measures used to acquire and retain it, in the popular imagination of films and boys’ magazines it still featured as a place of romantic and exotic adventure, a test of masculinity and character – as did war.13 Alongside the imperial crisis, the prime concerns for most Britons were mass unemployment and perceived physical degeneration – domestic problems for whose resolution England indeed often looked to Germany as a possible model. In German Journey, Christopher Sidgwick, who was often highly critical of the Nazi regime, nonetheless conceded that ‘there was, in this Germany of 1936, more enthusiasm, optimism, purpose, energy, guts if you like, than there was to be found in England’.14 It seemed that while Nazi Germany was marching, England hadn’t even pulled her socks up. Contemporary admiration for the new 11  See for instance Martin Gilbert, Britain and Germany Between the Wars, London, 1964, p. xii. Stone, Responses to Nazism, p. 146. Valentine Cunningham, ‘Neutral?: 1930s Writers and Taking Sides’, in Frank Gloversmith (ed.), Class, Culture and Social Change: A New View of the 1930s, Brighton, 1980, pp. 45–69, at p. 65. See also Stephen Spender, World Within World, London, 1951, pp. 142, 188. 12   Franklin Reid Gannon, The British Press and Germany, 1936–1939, Oxford, 1971, p. 13. 13   Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society and Culture in Britain, Oxford, 2004, pp. 264, 275. Paris, Warrior Nation, pp. 171, 150–1. 14   Christopher Sidgwick, German Journey, London, 1936, p. 262.

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Germany was much more unequivocally enthusiastic than retrospective accounts let on, often insisting on the observer’s sinister premonitions of imminent war.15 In fact, from 1937 onwards, when the Nazi regime had established itself, the English broadsheets, although alert to Nazi showmanship and to the persecution of Jews, tended to focus on Hitler’s ‘undoubted accomplishments’: ‘the virtual ending of unemployment, the fine new buildings and roads, and its seeming spiritual and physical regeneration of the German people’.16 Both nations traditionally used institutionalized sport and physical education in schools and clubs as a vehicle for nationalist and imperialist projects but also as a gauge of military prowess, soundness of character and standards of masculinity.17 Public schools and games culture were responsible for forming precisely the kind of masculinity and communal spirit that would condition men for the sacrifices demanded by service in the outposts of empire. This cultural imperialism would help secure the loyalty of the colonies and inculcate in the colonizers a racially determined sense of national identity. In the mid-1930s, however, W.H. Auden famously likened the very institution traditionally held to epitomize British virtues like individualism and liberalism to the ‘Fascist State’.18 His provocative rhetoric apart, Auden’s leftist suspicion about the conservative values underpinning the British cultural and political Establishment indicates perhaps a wider ideological uncertainty about the differences between democracy and totalitarianism, between conservatism and fascism. Not everybody articulated potential cultural similarities between Germany and Britain so bluntly or astutely. Cicely Hamilton, feminist and former suffragette, clearly identified in Germany’s ‘new cult of athletics’ a systematic ‘method of improving the race’ while naively upholding that England’s game culture had no serious purpose other than enjoyment of the game.19 Even if sport and games culture contributed to upholding the illusion of racial and moral superiority necessary for ruling a global empire, by the 1930s the Germans simply did a better job at demonstrating that they were in excellent shape, a (national) body ascendant. The link between the corporate state, the restitution (and expansion) of German territory and the pulchritudinous racially pure body merely began with organized physical culture, or Turnen, which certainly helped to forge a national body, unified, healthy, and strong.20 The only English-language Baedeker of Germany under the Nazis, published in time for the Berlin Olympics in August 1936, informed the English-speaking traveller that   See Griffiths, Fellow Travellers, pp. 225–6.  Gannon, British Press and Germany, p. 107. 17  R.W. Connell, Masculinities, Cambridge, 1995, p. 195. 18   W.H. Auden, ‘The Liberal Fascist’ (1934), in Edward Mendelsohn (ed.), The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings, 1927–1939, London, 1977, pp. 321–5, at p. 325. 19  Hamilton, Modern Germanies, p. 79. 20  Allen Guttmann, Games and Empires: Modern Sports and Cultural Imperialism, New York, 1994, pp. 143ff. 15

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‘Sport and physical culture have been developed to an amazing degree in recent years’ – a claim immediately proven by the overwhelming success of the German Olympic team who scooped 33 gold medals compared with Britain’s modest four.21 To the English observer, the new Germany was best represented through a splendid national physique, a corporeal phenomenology of the nation that compared favourably with a cramped, directionless and sluggish England, even with a crumbling British Empire. It may be no coincidence that George Bowling, George Orwell’s representative Englishman in Coming Up for Air (1939), is fat, flatfooted and toothless. We have already encountered concerns over national degeneracy, lack of virile leadership and the deplorable physical condition of the nation as part of the cultural context for literary responses to modernity in previous chapters. Calls for regeneration of the body and the nation did not only emanate from eugenicists but were also firmly part of the agenda of the organicist and rural preservation movement who argued for the return to an idealized past and a proud national identity expressed in a particular physique, landscape and rural way of life.22 Although minority movements among the Establishment, eugenicist and preservationist ideas resonated widely throughout the decade and spoke of a longing for the successes of authoritarian structures that we rarely find articulated so clearly elsewhere.23 Writer and foreign correspondent Philip Gibbs, touring ‘the new Germany’ several times, even came to doubt the principles of democratic freedom in the face of social inequality and poverty in Britain: ‘What good is a liberty which leads to C3 bodies, and produces an enormous population of mental defectives or young criminals?’24 What appealed to conservative preservationists was precisely the combination of progress and tradition with which Nazi Germany advertised itself abroad. Thomas Cook placed German-government sponsored advertisements in The Times and produced tourist brochures that presented the new Germany as a productive, harmonious and peaceful juxtaposition of modernity and   Karl Baedeker, Germany: A Handbook for Railway Travellers and Motorists, Leipzig, 1936, p. xlvi. 22  See for instance Stone, Responses to Nazism, Ch. 5. 23  On the sometimes alarmingly permeable boundaries between conservatism, fascism and preservationism, see Mattless, Landscape and Englishness, pp. 119–24. Greta Jones has laid bare the ideology of race and class that determined the policy of British eugenicists in the 1930s and 1940s. While the Eugenics Society was clearly concerned about the detrimental publicity effect of the Nazi Sterilization Law (1933) and dissociated itself from German eugenics, many of its members supported these measures in private. Greta Jones, Social Hygiene in Twentieth-Century Britain, London, 1986, p. 99. See also G.R. Searle, ‘Eugenics and Politics in Britain in the 1930s’, Annals of Science, 36 (1979): 159–69, at p. 167. 24   Philip Gibbs, Across the Frontiers, London, 1938, p. 184. Intellectuals like Leonard Woolf, however, saw fascist corporeality as a beautiful empty vessel for nihilist thought – the ideal instrument of Hitler’s anti-intellectual policy. Quack, Quack!, London, 1935, p. 81. 21

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tradition, progress and custom which appealed to the broadest possible spectrum, to modernists and anti-modernists alike (Fig. 6.1).

Figure 6.1

Thomas Cook & Sons: ‘Germany is News’ (1934)

Similarly, the German Railway Bureau in London, which organized many journeys, suggested Germany’s broad appeal (Fig. 6.2). Campaigns like these were launched to counteract alarmist reports about militarist displays and violence against minorities and dissidents; modern Germany was really the old Germany but in

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Figure 6.2 German Railways Bureau, Germany Welcomes You (1938)

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better shape, and personal encounters with the population of the new Germany would bear this out, those advertisements confidently claimed: ‘See for yourself’. Part of the physical regeneration of the German nation was credited to its various institutions that encouraged regular exercise, meaningful recreation and esprit de corps: the Strength Through Joy organization, the paramilitary youth organizations and the National Labour Corps (Reichsarbeitsdienst). The British government clearly recognized the need to encourage fitness as a means to stem ‘degeneration’ for reasons of political economy. The 1937 PEP report on the British Health Services noted that ‘the problem of physical education has become more pressing because it has been suggested that the population of Great Britain may be considerably less fit than that of some Continental countries, notably Germany’. The report dismissed the informal approach to physical education ‘with its Cinderella status in the curriculum’ as turning out a population of ‘physical illiterates’. Echoing decade-old concerns about national degeneration, this assessment also implied that the most effective solution might indeed be military conscription.25 As late as 1939, the former Chief Medical Officer Sir George Newman looked to Germany for models of fitness in The Building of a Nation’s Health.26 Two years earlier, the Physical Training and Recreation Act had set up the National Fitness Council which launched a National Fitness Campaign. Its campaign booklet patriotically proclaimed, ‘It is everybody’s duty as a citizen to be as fit as possible’.27 However, those citizens who had taken fitness seriously before it became a national imperative, who had perhaps joined the Women’s League of Health and Beauty (founded in 1930) and delighted in the ‘controlled exhibitionism’ of choreographed gymnastics, now found themselves unfavourably lumped together with fascist organizations such as the Bund deutscher Mädel (League of German Girls) rather than praised for their sense of citizenship.28 As soon as the paramilitary or corporate aspects of games culture and organized sports became too visible (or too enjoyable?), the association was made with German fascism and Italian totalitarianism rather than British imperialism. Admiring the new German body from afar spoke of a nostalgic desire for the glorious imperial British tradition but imitating fascist corporeality conceded that the present and the future were German. As Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann have argued in The Racial State, what one actually sees in 1930s Germany is an increasingly homogenous national community in which undesirable elements (the ‘asocial’, the ‘work-shy’, the   Political and Economic Planning (ed.), Report on the British Health Services, London, 1937, pp. 338, 350. 26   Mattless, Landscape and Englishness, pp. 92ff. 27   National Fitness Council (ed.), The National Fitness Campaign, London, 1939, p. 8. 28   Jill Julius Matthews, ‘“They had Such a Lot of Fun”: The Women’s League of Health and Beauty Between the Wars’, History Workshop Journal, 30 (1990): 22–55, at p. 30. 25

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‘feebleminded’, political dissidents, male homosexuals and promiscuous women, Jewish professionals and civil servants, Sinti and Roma) have been marginalized, forcibly removed from public life or confined to labour and concentration camps.29 The removal of ‘asocial’ elements, from the very early days of the seizure of power in 1933 onwards, was also sanctioned as a cosmetic measure for the benefit of tourists. The Nazi propaganda machine used the enormous Nuremberg Party Rallies to exhibit the regenerated fascist body and the resplendent corporate state to the attending Germans as well as to international guests.30 One might expect that Himmler’s SS guard would attract particular attention since they presented a sinister combination of violence and aestheticism, furnishing an elite breeding pool for the future Aryan super race in projects such as the Lebensborn.31 However, it was the men of the Labour Corps that sent observers into raptures, not least because their physique was presented as one of the most effective socioeconomic 29   Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany 1933– 1945, Cambridge, 1991, p. 168. The vast propaganda efforts of mass events and cinematic spectacle that kept projecting to the very end of the war what should already have been an indubitable reality could also be read as evidence that the racial homogenization was ultimately unsuccessful. Yet the effect of propaganda often destabilized the difference between ideological fiction and actual reality, and effected a perception of homogeneity both for the national and the foreign observer. It took an Irishman with a distinct sense of the absurd to point out the irony that the ideals of the master race were hardly borne out in the grotesque physique of its leaders. Samuel Beckett, who toured Germany in 1936, observed that the perfect Aryan must be ‘blond like Hitler, thin like Göring, handsome like Goebbels, virile like Röhm – and be called Rosenberg’. Cited in James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, London, 1996, p. 297. 30   Certainly by 1936–37 Germany had become a tourist attraction for all sections of the British public curious about the regime or interested in Anglo-German relations, with the Party rallies a particular destination. For a comprehensive analysis of travellers’ motives see Schwarz, Die Reise ins Dritte Reich. The spa towns continued to advertise and capitalize on Germany as an ultra-health-conscious nation with health-giving institutions; middle-class British tour operators such as Thomas Cook also continued to market spa trips. See for instance ‘A Tour of German Spas’, The Traveller’s Gazette, 3 (1935): 17. Despite the growing awareness of the reality behind Nazi propaganda and continued reports on anti-Semitic measures, pro-German feeling among the general population continued to grow right up to the war (Griffiths, Fellow Travellers, p. 306). Even the most measured descriptions of the Party rallies, clearly recognizing the highly dramatic choreography of the events and the Wagnerian effects so masterfully underscored in Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935), register the emotional impact of the events and the admiration for the sheer organizational skill involved in putting such a spectacle together. The Times correspondent found the spectacles ‘impressive even to those foreign visitors who had begun to grow a little weary of a six-day procession of uniformed parades’. ‘Brown Army’, The Times, 10 September 1934, p. 12. 31  See Frederic Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics, London, 2003, p. 53. Paul Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics Between National Unification and Nazism, 1870–1945, Cambridge, 1989, p. 476.

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measures in combating degeneration, unemployment and asocial behaviour by conscripting men into six months of agricultural or building work (Fig. 6.3).32

Figure 6.3

Reichsarbeitsdienst, Reichsparteitag Nürnberg, September 1937 (Bundesarchiv Koblenz, Bild 146-1975-050-24A).

They invited comparison with the contemporary British means-testing for social benefit and with British masculinity in general. Female travellers in particular were impressed.33 Ada Chesterton eulogized how the Labour Corps had trained and drilled unemployed youths into ‘superb specimens of vigorous manhood, like young eagles, turned proudly to the sun’.34 Nora Waln, otherwise critical of Nazi ideology, noted the amazing muscular results of the labour camp experience: 32

 Nazi Germany is a powerful test case of Bernard Schweizer’s argument that travellers in the 1930s were ‘deeply anchored in the historical imperatives and dominant ideologies of their own societies’; Radicals on the Road: The Politics of English Travel Writing in the 1930s, Charlottesville, 2001, p. 174. That (self-evident) anchoring to the left or to the right notwithstanding, Nazism offered persuasive corporeal iconographies for both political persuasions; therein lay its mass appeal. 33   A notable exception is the pacifist and feminist Vera Brittain who travelled to Germany in March 1936 and reported on some electoral mass events for the Sunday Chronicle. 34  Ada Chesterton, Sickle or Swastika? London, 1935, p. 44.

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‘They all go out brown and hard, holding their heads high and their backs flat’.35 Still merely ‘a picturesque sight’ in 1934, two years later the Labour Corps was the fascist body ascendant, Hitler’s Army of Spades, with 43,000 men marching past until the final glorious exhibition: Bringing up the rear of the long marching line were 1,500 men representing the elite of the Labour Corps, who are destined to become their leaders. These men, stripped to the waist, presented a striking contrast to the detachments which had preceded them, and their proud display of physical strength and hardiness was symbolic of that ideal of bodily fitness which inspires Germany today.36

The notion that physical fitness predestines for leadership echoes of course the Social Darwinist principles that underpinned the spirit of the British Empire. The ‘physical strength and hardiness’ that inspired The Times correspondent had a more erotically inflected appeal to the pro-German academic Randolph Hughes, who eulogized that ‘the sight of this pale-brown naked flesh was one of the most unforgettable things’.37 These impressive specimens of the Aryan race had a firm place in Nazi racial policy: We are training real men for the women – decent, brave, and honourable. When the women see the fine Labour Service boys, dressed only in trousers and with breasts all bare, they must say, ‘It is nice for the women and what fine fellows are here! And conscription, what marvellous training!’38

This eroticized paramilitary display of male pulchritude is clearly meant to make the nation’s prospective mothers applaud the kind of regime that delivers these magnificent specimens to their orderly marital beds for the prescribed replenishment of the Aryan race and endorse national labour and military service. The Rhetoric and iconography surrounding the Labour Corps demonstrate that this institution was part of a civilian rearmament effort. In peacetime men in the Labour Corps were ‘Arbeitsmänner’ (men of work) or ‘Soldaten der Arbeit’;39 in wartime they  Nora Waln, The Approaching Storm, London, 1988, p. 112 [originally published as Reaching for the Stars, 1939]. 36   ‘An Army with Spades’, The Times, 7 September 1934, p. 12. ‘Germany and Soviet’, The Times, 11 September 1936, p. 14. 37  Hughes, ‘Germany Re-Arisen’, p.10. 38  Adolf Hitler cited in The Times, 14 September 1936, p. 9. Robert Ley, head of the Nazi Labour Front, was reported to have underlined this point: ‘party affiliation and the army are the institutes of beauty for men; the family and motherhood are those for women’. ‘Promoting Pulchritude under Nazism’, Foreign Letters, Journal of the American Medical Association, 114 (1940): 70. 39  See Bundesarchiv Koblenz, picture archive, poster 003-013-00872, Der Reichsarbeitsdienst ruft! (1938): ‘Arbeitsmänner sind frische, frohe, selbstbewußte 35

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became ‘Helfer der Wehrmacht’ (helpers of the Wehrmacht) in an iconography that prefigures the socialist realist ‘heroes of work’ of the eastern bloc. The proud athleticism of the Labour Corps captured in Ferry Ahrlé’s 1943 poster (Fig. 6.4) is certainly reminiscent of Arno Breker’s monumental statues. The poster’s caption states that the Labour Corps does not just accompany the army as part of a logistical effort of battle and occupation, but, thus initiated and trained, forms its best recruits. Note the visual equivalence of military campaign and construction work: one has to look closely to identify the vehicles on the bridge as military trucks rather than merely lorries transporting rubble or other building material. They will eventually exchange their tan-coloured outfit for the grey uniform of the Wehrmacht. A year later, René Ahrlé’s ‘Reichsarbeitsdienst’ poster (Fig. 6.5) still used the familiar image of the bare-chested athletic Aryan male shouldering a spade and enjoying homosocial camaraderie, but the subtitle makes clear what being a soldier of work must inevitably lead to in the fifth year of war: ‘Wir rüsten Leib und Seele’. This type of work conscription did not just ‘prepare’ body and soul, it literally armed them for conflict. Yet few British observers seemed to have seen the Labour Corps as a paramilitary institution.40 Nazi propaganda packaged as paramilitary aesthetics touched a nerve in those English observers who were concerned about the future of their own nation. For John Baker White, motorist and travel writer, the ‘brown-skinned, magnificent specimens of fit young manhood’ that Nazi Germany produced provoked time and again the kind of question that is implied in all these rapturous accounts of male German physique: with a little less Teutonic drill, would not the kind of measures that helped Germany regenerate itself also infuse the British nation and the Empire with renewed lifeblood: ‘for the future greatness of Britain our rising generations must have fit minds in fit bodies’.41 Many Conservatives failed to see that one could not just naively select those elements of Nazism one considered beneficial without flirting dangerously with totalitarianism as a whole. We can see the palingenetic logic that leads from regenerated bodies to reinvigorated imperialism by examining the political uses of rhetoric about German bodies and the British Empire. Thus Lord Winterton, Conservative MP for Horsham, to the House of Commons on 22 May 1935: The German nation, as a whole, possesses in a mental and physical sense, a virility and determination which has seldom, if ever, been exceeded in the world’s history. […] See the German boys in school; see the German young men and women; see the magnificent physique and determination of these people.42

Soldaten der Arbeit’ (‘Men of work are fresh, merry, self-confident soldiers of work’). 40   Exceptions are Philip Gibbs and Nora Waln. See also Schwarz, Die Reise ins Dritte Reich, pp. 230, 242. 41   John Baker White, Dover–Nürnberg Return, London, 1937, pp. 25, 74, 27–8. 42   Cited in Gilbert, Britain and Germany Between the Wars, p.79.

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Figure 6.4

Ferry Ahrlé, Arbeitsmänner als Helfer der Wehrmacht (1943), (Bundesarchiv Koblenz, Bild 003-013-009)

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Figure 6.5 René Ahrlé, Reichsarbeitsdienst: Wir rüsten Leib und Seele (1944), (Bundesarchiv Koblenz, Bild 003-013-006)

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Note the linking of virility, determination and magnificence: it is the actual body of the Germans that vouches for the spirit of the nation.43 Admiration of the fascist body beautiful should not be equated with a wholesale endorsement of Nazi racial policy. However, the rhetoric that informs the desire to emulate this sort of palingenesis as a means to restore and retain the British Empire, often combines a very similar romanticized, even mythologized, view of the national past with a strong endorsement of corporeal and corporate modernity underpinned by technological progress that is now often seen as specific to the Nazi regime. For instance, Reginald Northam’s idea of a regenerated British nation specifically invokes a familiar image of nineteenth-century imperial glory complete with soldier heroes and hegemonic masculinities that is not all that different from the pulchritudinous and duty-bound specimens of the master race: We [ought to] count ourselves as instruments, doing our best and using all our abilities in carrying out a great divine purpose for our country and the Empire, and thus for the world. […] Join to fitter bodies and better trained minds more self-control, a greater spirit of adventure, an appreciation of a great and glorious tradition, the recapture of proper values, and a supreme determination by individuals to spend themselves in service, and the result will be a great revival.44

It is perhaps apposite here to remember that the Nazis saw enough common ground between themselves and the British Empire, with its dominant ideology of complacent superiority forged from militarism and Social Darwinism, to wish to adapt and amplify its methods in their own aggressive pursuit of Lebensraum (‘room to live’). Like Lord Winterton’s statement to the House of Commons cited earlier, Baker White’s and Northam’s comments implicate the phenomenology of eugenics, that sound bodies somehow indicate, even guarantee, sound minds, strong character and a superb gene pool. The list of qualities that would restore the ‘great and glorious tradition’ built on unspecified but ‘proper values’ of course refers to an empire whose maintenance ‘offered tangible proof’ to conservative imperialists of the superiority of the English while at the same time revealing fears

43

 In contrast, for the writer and painter Wyndham Lewis body and spirit no longer corresponded when he visited Germany in 1936. Although he received ‘as great an impression as ever of massive physical energy’ he ‘experienced a certain shock, upon realizing the ineradicable “nayceness” of the modern German mind. You know what it is – when you find that the gladiator reads Little Lord Fauntleroy in his spare time, it is sort of disillusioning.’ For once the fascists weren’t fascist enough. Wyndham Lewis, ‘Berlin Revisited’, Modernism/Modernity, 4 (1997): 175–80, at p. 180. 44  Reginald Northam, Conservatism the Only Way, London, 1939, pp. 248, 252. Philip Gibbs also identified precisely ‘this devotion to duty, this readiness for sacrifice’ as a potential danger in Nazi Germany; European Journey, London, 1934, p. 303.

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about their deterioration as a ruling race.45 These voices calling for an emulation of Germany’s corporeal phenomenology responded to precisely what Jeffrey Herf has called ‘reactionary modernism’ and what, in Thomas Mann’s assessment, made the Nazis so dangerously popular: a strong endorsement of modernity and progress combined with an invented tradition of a mythologized past that merged into a ‘technological romanticism’.46 Unlike the Nazis, the British did not need to fashion the past into a lost tradition; they saw it slipping away. The evidence for the appeal of fascist corporeality as a symptom of reactionary modernism across a broad cultural and political spectrum of observers is overwhelming. Travel writers eulogized the beautiful German ‘soldiers of modernism’; foreign correspondents admired in the synchronized movement of the masses ‘the notable precision of the German Army, which is always a pleasure to watch’;47 the British ambassador, Sir Nevile Henderson, described the massed formations of brownshirts at the 1937 Party Rally as ‘indescribably picturesque’ with a ‘grandiose beauty’ surpassing that of the Bolshoi Ballet;48 Conservative politicians could not speak of the German body without thinking of the British Empire. The German present spoke painfully of the British past. Animated Bodies: Border Crossings into the Corporate State The corporate state invented a new semiotics in which signs constituted a metonymy of racially pure national essence that ensured völkisch unity: the swastika flag, two national anthems and patriotic songs, ritualistic, liturgical mass events, Nazified language as well as ubiquitous uniforms and the Führer portrait.49 These omnipresent semiotics insisted on physical participation in the corporate state. The 1936 Baedeker, for instance, eager to decode indigenous culture, advised the English-speaking traveller of the new German Salute:

45   Martin Pugh, ‘Hurrah For the Blackshirts!’: Fascists and Fascism in Britain Between the Wars, London, 2005, p. 180. 46  Herf, Reactionary Modernism. Thomas Mann, ‘Deutschland und die Deutschen’, in Politische Schriften und Reden, vol. 3, Frankfurt/Main, 1968, pp. 161­–78, at p. 174. 47   ‘Obedience to the First Law’, The Times, 17 September 1936, p. 14. 48  Sir Nevile Henderson, Failure of a Mission: Berlin 1937–1939, London, 1941, p. 71. 49   Already in 1933 Cicely Hamilton noticed ‘the prevalence of bunting […] always, always and everywhere’ as a widespread demonstration of renewed German self-confidence in government; Modern Germanies (1937 [1933]), p. 268. Patrick Leigh Fermor, who crossed the border from Holland into Germany in winter 1933 on his journey to Constantinople, remembered ‘the scarlet flag charged with its white disk and its black swastika’ as the clearest image of his transition into a new territory; A Time of Gifts, Harmondsworth, 1979, pp. 42–3.

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The Deutscher Gruß (German Salute) or ‘Hitler-Gruß’, i.e. the raising of the right arm, accompanied by the words ‘Heil Hitler’, has since 1933 largely superseded the practice of hat-raising. The army, navy, and air force retain the military salute; but the Deutscher Gruss is compulsory for officials, and for everybody when the national anthems are played.50

While the salute may not be mandatory for the visitor, the anthropological tone of this passage (‘the practice of hat raising’) certainly implies that the Hitler Salute is the polite thing to do when in Germany.51 Consequently travellers who respectfully adapt to the host culture subject themselves to Nazification whereby their bodies participate in fascist aesthetics and practices. John Heygate, motoring through Germany in 1934 and 1936, found the German Salute the easiest way to signal to his environment that he was not a ‘hostile foreigner’ but merely a friendly tourist: ‘apart from feeling myself now an object of suspicion until my right hand went out like a shot from the shoulder, I enjoyed it. It was a game.’ The salute could be modified into the wrist flicking of an ‘English “heil”’.52 For Nazi sympathizers such as Randolph Hughes, ‘Hitler [was] the vital animating force behind all this […] “Heil Hitler!” ha[d] replaced or supplemented a whole host of expressions from good-bye to Amen’.53 Since the corporate state reshaped common language use and acculturated the body by ‘animating’ it, it seemed difficult for tourists and travellers to escape Nazification. A tourist brochure of Thomas Cook in 1936 proclaimed an ecstatic ‘Heil! Summer!’, implying that the new German semiotics even reached into the most innocent holiday activity (Fig. 6.6). How could one not be ‘heiling’ glorious weather and magnificent panoramas when everyone else seemed to be perfectly happy doing the same? Thomas Cook did not just advertise that holidaying in Nazi Germany was an unproblematic choice, but with these images naively contributed to the normalization of this new Germany within the modern European political landscape. However, acculturation could lend transit into Nazi Germany an anxious note because it made it much harder to remain (literally) untouched by fascist practice.

  Baedeker, Germany (1936), p. lxii.  On those occasions, on German territory, the foreign body seems to have been invited to Nazify itself to various degrees: at the entry of national delegations at the opening festivities of the Olympic Games a variety of salutes was observed by The Times foreign correspondent, from the ‘old’ Olympic salute of the raised hand to the goose-stepping of the Bulgarian team. Yet France, the old arch enemy, preceding Britain, ‘stole much of the British thunder’: while the British team saluted simply with eyes right, a ‘roar of surprise and delight went up when the Frenchmen, who included some smart military competitors in uniform, raised their right arms. And the roar grew in warmth’. ‘The Olympiad Opened’, The Times, 3 August 1936, p. 11. 52  Heygate, Motor Tramp, pp. 174–5, 193. 53  Hughes, ‘Germany Re-Arisen’, p. 11. 50 51

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‘Heil! Summer!’ Thomas Cook & Sons brochure (1937)

When Virginia and Leonard Woolf motored from Holland to Rome in May 1935, their border crossing was fraught with considerable anxiety: Sitting in the sun outside the German customs. A car with the swastika on the back window has just passed through the barrier into Germany. L. is in the customs […] Ought I to go and see what is happening? The Dutch customs took 10 seconds. This has taken 10 minutes already. The windows are barred. […] But L. said that when a peasant came in & stood with his hat on, the man said This office is like a Church & made him move it. Heil Hitler said the little thin boy opening his bag, perhaps with an apple in it, at the barrier. We become

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Woolf’s observation of the mechanisms of authoritarian discipline (formality, thoroughness, bureaucracy, order and regulations) is noticeable because the couple’s experience is also set against that of other German citizens: the car that passes through the barrier, the boy who crosses and identifies himself as German by the salute. The Woolfs are already marked – like the disrespectful peasant – as ‘other’ in the culture through which they wish to pass and which demands their submission to it like a physical stoop: the peasant has to take his hat off, the Woolfs become unconsciously ‘obsequious’. We have seen in the last chapter how carefully Woolf negotiated Bayreuth in 1909; trying to avoid the horror of being conspicuous and the horror of mingling inconspicuously with the gross Teutonic race proved a difficult task. Given how grotesque the German body was for Woolf,55 transitioning into Nazi Germany now involved a certain grotesquery on her part too: further along on the journey down the Rhine, things get worse: we were chased across the river by Hitler (or Goering) had to pass through ranks of children with red flags. They cheered Mitzi. I raised my hand. People gathering in the sunshine – rather forced like school sports. Banners stretched across the street ‘The Jew is our enemy’ ‘There is no place for Jews in –’. So we whizzed along until we got out of range of the docile hysterical crowd. Our obsequiousness gradually turning to anger. Nerves rather frayed. A sense of stupid mass feeling masked by good temper.56

German crowds expecting Nazi bigwigs cheer instead, unbeknownst to them, a prominent English writer, her Jewish husband and a marmoset – this is surely a scene worth the fixing in a diary. How Woolf rationalizes her emotional and physical response to Nazi enthusiasm is a different matter altogether. Her High Modernist unease about the encroaching masses has a lot to do with her anger here. For modernists, masses were regressive, near-primeval phenomena, and therefore it is no surprise to find Leonard Woolf speak of the cheering German crowds encountered on this tour as ‘native savages’ in his autobiography, a term

54   Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell, 5 vols, Harmondsworth, 1983, vol. 4: 1931–35, pp. 310–11. 55  See also Woolf’s diary entry on Minna Green, perhaps a model for Miss Kilman, on 19 September 1921: ‘Now she is off to spend a fortnight in Germany – a country she thinks very beautiful. I said there were too many signposts and plaster statues. She would have none of it. But then her thick legs, laced boots, wooden face, flaxen hair (scanty) & red cheeks, would be respectable there; ludicrous in Italy or France.’ Diary, vol. 2, p. 140. 56   Woolf, Diary, vol. 4, p. 311.

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also reminiscent of anti-German rhetoric around the time of the First World War.57 Most remarkable, however, is Woolf’s physical response to the native savages – her obsequiousness – a term encompassing various degrees of cooperation, from dutiful compliance to servile ingratiation. Despite the anti-Semitic banners and despite her husband’s Jewishness she raises her hand. This may not be a full-blown Hitler Salute (and we might want to remember here John Heygate’s anglicized version of wrist-flicking), but Woolf’s analysis of the situation in this elliptical passage suggests a level of guilt: is she angry at the Germans for their Nazi rituals or angry at herself for having been animated by them? Are her nerves frayed because she felt threatened by the situation or because her physical response to fascism made her uncomfortable? How could the crowd be both ‘docile’ and ‘hysterical’? Heygate reports a similarly ambivalent moment of overcompensation in Motor Tramp. After an amicable chat with a couple of SS men he seems to enjoy the relief of kinship: ‘A side of me was released and made instant contact with a side of the German character’. This feeling of familiarity is then immediately countered with a dismissal of German sentimentality in favour of English emotional restraint and above all with the realization that the Germans ‘had lusts more animal than the animals’: ‘their real human feelings, thrust down and forgotten, turned cruel and brutal and drove them to surprising acts of violence’.58 Kinship with the German fascists equates to a civilizatory regression that must be resisted at all costs. Therefore Woolf and Heygate repudiate fascism’s affective force, its pull on the body, let alone the English body, which turns out to be just as docile, compliant and easy to train. What Woolf’s diary dismisses as the encroachment of the crowd’s hysteria is, rather, the traveller’s own hysteria, her unconscious desire to fulfil contradictory desires: to participate and yet remain outside the spectacle; to be moved and yet remain untouched; to be emotionally deeply involved and yet intellectually critical; to dominate and yet to submit. This paradox is precisely what we find in many of the scenarios in 1930s fiction set in Germany, novels that dramatize the English body as animated or contaminated by fascist thought while at the same time actively courting this acculturation. The English Vice: Fascist Fantasy as Imperialist Release No one is better suited to demonstrate the ritual anxiety occasioned by border crossings than Christopher Isherwood’s camp Arthur Norris in Mr Norris Changes Trains.59 Wracked by the fear of being unmasked and found out by German passport  Leonard Woolf, An Autobiography, 2 vols, Oxford, 1980, vol. 2: 1911–1969, p. 331. However, Woolf does not mention his wife’s physical response to the crowd at all (p. 328–9). On modernists and masses see John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses. 58  Heygate, Motor Tramp, p. 192. 59  On border crossings and anxiety see also Paul Fussell, Abroad: Literary Travel Between the Wars, Oxford, 1980, pp. 30–1. 57

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control, Norris fights dishevelment in front of the narrator, William Bradshaw. Our first impression of Norris is that of an unstable, disintegrating body held together by expensive tailoring and accessories, cosmetic props and strategic maintenance. Norris is clearly terrified at the prospect of being at the mercy of the uniformed guards but also – as we shall see later – quite titillated by the prospect. His response to fascism displays a typically hysterical split: the desire for subjection as well as a fierce refusal to enjoy it. All of Norris’s erotic relationships in the novel – all of them with Germans – are characterized by this hysterical ambivalence and by a pronounced sadomasochistic theatricality. The narrator William Bradshaw watches Norris with fascination, as a spectacle to which he is irresistibly drawn, with whom he cannot help but sympathize, whom he must forgive every lie and subterfuge. In this second split between the semi-detached restrained English observer and the absurd, involved, corrupted Englishman, Isherwood enacts the ambivalent attitudes of English culture towards fascist seduction. This detachment (subsequently epitomized in Isherwood’s programmatic ‘I am a camera’) is less a fictional ‘refusal to be involved in the destiny of other people’ as Norman Page has argued, than merely one role in a scripted fantasy that requires an onlooker and a participant.60 Isherwood’s Berlin novels have become representative of the British view of Weimar decadence precisely because of this shifting position between detachment and involvement, which is first embodied in the split between Bradshaw and Norris and later in the ‘Christopher’ character. It is an attitude almost directly copied from the tropes of travel writing in which the writer hovers between the positions of observer and participant. Accompanying her husband Harold Nicholson, who had been posted to Berlin in the late 1920s, Vita SackvilleWest wrote to Virginia Woolf of the ‘sights’ of the capital: We went to the sodomites’ ball [Ball der Jugend]. A lot of them were dressed as women, but I fancy I was the only genuine article in the room. A very odd sight. We also went to a bicycle race which lasts for 6 days and 6 nights, round and round a banked-up track under arc-lights. There are certainly very queer things to be seen in Berlin, and I think Potto will enjoy himself.61

This passage is remarkable not just for its references to the modernity of Weimar Berlin – a vibrant homosexual culture and velodrome track racing imported from the USA – but for Sackville-West’s detached attitude to it. Berlin’s version of modernity was not genteel enough for Nicholson/West; its subculture too rough, brash and indiscreet, its gay men too transvestitic, its lesbians too leering and red-haired, its architecture too vulgar and pompous. ‘A very odd sight’ with ‘very queer things’, Berlin could and should only be enjoyed as a grotesque curiosity as if through a protective pane of glass. And yet again, Woolf seems to  Norman Page, Auden and Isherwood: The Berlin Years, New York, 1998, p. 190.  Dated 12 January 1929. The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf, ed. Louise DeSalvo and Mitchell A. Leaska, London, 1992, p. 324. 60 61

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have succumbed to the lure of the place on her subsequent visit. Seduced by the permissive atmosphere, ‘Potto’ enjoyed herself so much that she made a ‘startling and disturbing’ declaration of love to Sackville-West on top of the Funkturm.62 Antony Shuttleworth has read Isherwood’s Arthur Norris as a monstrously alluring allegory of fascist aesthetics in which reality is constructed through performance.63 This reading, however, ignores discourses of national identity. Norris features in sexual scenarios in which an English body is subjugated by a German. For Laura Frost, the construction of Germany as the sexual unconscious of modernism’s political imaginary is firmly part of English interwar culture which eroticizes fascism in a sadomasochistic fantasy in which submission and domination are shifting positions; in other words, fascism as a sadomasochistic fantasy (as opposed to the historically real murderous ideology) allows a pleasurable border crossing from the healthy restraint and civilized repression of liberal democracy into the eroticized excess of fascism.64 Imagine Bradshaw’s surprise as he discovers one raucous night that Norris has a penchant for having his bottom spanked: ‘Nein, nein! Mercy! Oh dear! Hilfe! Hilfe! There was no mistaking the voice. They had got Arthur in there, and were robbing him and knocking him about. I might have known it. We were fools ever to have poked our noses into a dark place like this. We had only ourselves to thank. Drink made me brave. Struggling forward to the door, I pushed it open. The first person I saw was Anni. She was standing in the middle of the room. Arthur cringed on the floor at her feet. He had removed several more of his garments, and was now dressed, lightly but with perfect decency, in a suit of mauve silk underwear, a rubber abdominal belt and a pair of socks. In one hand he held a brush and in the other a yellow shoe rag. Olga towered behind him, brandishing a heavy leather whip. ‘You call that clean, you swine!’ she cried in a terrible voice. ‘Do them again this minute! And if I find a speck of dirt on them I’ll thrash you till you can’t sit down for a week.’ As she spoke she gave Arthur a smart cut across the buttocks. He uttered a squeal of

  See subsequent letter dated ‘Friday’ [25 January 1929], Letters of Vita SackvilleWest, p. 325. 63  Antony Shuttleworth, ‘In A Populous City: Isherwood in the Thirties’, in James J. Berg and Chris Freeman (eds), The Isherwood Century, Madison, 2000, pp. 150–61, at p. 155. 64   Frost, Sex Drives, pp. 30ff. Much of Frost’s argument convincingly modifies Susan Sontag’s baffled concern over the attraction to fascist aesthetics in the post-war gay SM scene as well as Andrew Hewitt’s readings of ‘Homofascism’. See Susan Sontag, ‘Fascinating Fascism’, in Under the Sign of Saturn, London, 1996, pp. 73–109. Andrew Hewitt, Political Inversions: Homosexuality, Fascism and the Modernist Imaginary, Stanford, 1996. 62

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As Freud argued in his essay ‘A Child Is Being Beaten’ (1919), in a masochistic fantasy the onlooker is as important as the participants because they are projections of mutually exclusive desires whose simultaneous satisfaction the scenario stages.66 Bradshaw is presented with an invitation that would require him to abandon his restraint, to cross the border into the possibility of having ‘his turn’ at polishing a German whore’s boots and submitting to her chastisement. In order to retain his scandalized position of English detachment (as opposed to the involved Englishman delighting in Hunnish aggression), he must of course decline. The oedipal desires behind this sexual script are highly familiar to both the dominatrices and Norris; indeed, as Susan Sontag argues in ‘Fascinating Fascism’, this is a culturally specific English fantasy: the perennial Englishman in a brothel being whipped is re-creating an experience. He is paying a whore to act out a piece of theatre with him, to reenact or revoke the past – experiences of his schooldays or nursery which now hold for him a huger reserve of sexual energy. […] What the French call ‘the English vice’ could, however, be said to be something of an artful affirmation of individuality; the playlet referred, after all, to the subject’s own case history.67

With Anni and Olga, Norris clearly is the public school boy that re-enacts the past, even if it is a highly self-conscious theatrical act (and therefore comical) in which screams are shammed and lines tightly scripted. Norris’s sexual taste may well be an ‘artful affirmation of individuality’ if one thinks of him as an English eccentric. 65   Christopher Isherwood, Mr Norris Changes Trains, London, 1996, pp. 35–6. All subsequent references to this edition are cited parenthetically in the text. 66  Sigmund Freud, ‘A Child Is Being Beaten’, Standard Edition, vol. 17, pp. 175– 204. 67  Sontag, ‘Fascinating Fascism’, p. 104.

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Yet he also represents the other side of the establishment that traditionally produces Britain’s political, social and cultural elite, the decadent, seedier, irresponsible side that might once have been despatched to a minor colonial outpost as a form of familial damage limitation but is now exported to Germany, where it ‘belongs’; and indeed Norris professes ‘to have exported everything which is – er – exportable’ (25). In this sense his sexuality re-enacts the case history of a whole social class that wishes to be relieved of the burden of superiority and power. Norris wears a kind of uniform over his camp underwear that ‘holds him in’ – the rubber corset – and prevents his complete disintegration about which the scenario nonetheless fantasizes (‘Killing’s too good for you’, ‘I’ll skin you alive’). His theatricalized sexuality and the way in which his grotesque body is dramatized as always on the brink of spilling over, or out of, restraining clothes, disintegrating with age, excessively perspiring and so on, underlines the way in which the sadomasochistic fantasy permeates the entire plot: Norris is always running away from something or someone he intensely desires and yet loathes. The image that concludes the novel, the sinister secretary-cum-nemesis Herr Schmidt in global pursuit of Arthur, echoes the whipping scene: ‘what have I done to deserve this?’ (229). As Bradshaw realizes, this is clearly a higher form of pleasure for Arthur in which both he and Herr Schmidt can shift positions of domination and submission. In Goodbye to Berlin, Germany is a diseased body politic: the sickbed of the Weimar Republic with the virus of Nazism running riot and the body adjusting itself to being invaded and taken over, already imagining the contamination as cure. For Isherwood (as for Stephen Spender), Germany is all about corporeality: physical culture, sport, racial hygiene, violent street fights, working-class poverty, prostitution, abortion and tuberculosis. Above all, Germany is an eroticized male body: ‘For Christopher, Berlin meant Boys,’ he admitted in his memoirs of the time.68 This emerges most clearly in the Rügen section of Goodbye to Berlin, which focuses on the torturous relationship between the German Otto Nowak and the English visitor Peter Wilkinson, a projection of Isherwood’s relationship with his German lover Walter. In their beach games and exercises, Wilkinson ‘drives himself about, lashing his stiff, ungraceful body with the whip of his merciless will’ in order to keep up with Otto ‘who moves fluidly, effortlessly; his gestures have the savage, unconscious grace of a cruel, elegant animal’.69 Here the English body does not need to be spanked into the pleasure of subjection. The native savage supposedly encourages Wilkinson’s primitive instincts in competitive sports. Wilkinson’s physical ineptitude would make every eugenicist frown and mutter warnings about degeneracy, yet is his physical exercise here not presented in explicitly   Christopher Isherwood, Christopher and his Kind: 1929–1939, London, 1977, p.

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69   Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin, London, 1990, p. 101. Subsequent references to this edition are cited parenthetically in the text.

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fascist terms as a ‘triumph of the will’, as if he had been infected by Otto’s vanity or German enthusiasm for muscular masculinity? The sadomasochistic aspect of their relationship is less theatrical than Norris’s antics but seems nonetheless to be a necessary part of the attraction of sex tourism to Germany, once again a remembering, repeating and working through of specifically English class-bound childhood scenarios. In Isherwood’s memoirs the appeal of sadomasochism is again projected onto the German other. In one and the same paragraph he can say: ‘What excited Christopher most, a struggle which turned gradually into a sex act, seemed perfectly natural to these German boys […] Maybe, also, such mildly sadistic play was characteristic of German sensuality’.70 More importantly, what attracts Isherwood and his fictional doubles to ‘German sensuality’ is a desire for submission that can only be realized abroad. Isherwood indeed admitted, ‘Christopher was suffering from an inhibition, then not unusual among upper-class homosexuals; he couldn’t relax sexually with a member of his own class or nation. He needed a workingclass foreigner’.71 Young, foreign, working-class and athletic, Otto’s attractiveness is reminiscent of those kinds of erotic otherness romanticized in contemporary English fiction, be it D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover or E.M. Forster’s Maurice. In Goodbye to Berlin, Wilkinson’s awkward physique is sharply contrasted with Nowak’s adolescent prowess in a way that suggests not just class differences, but also national and cultural otherness: ‘Otto is his whole body; Peter is only his head’ (101). Yet as the narrator observes, Otto has a restorative physical effect on Wilkinson’s bearing and physique: Peter will be sitting at the table, hunched up, his downward-curving mouth lined with childhood fears: a perfect case-picture of his twisted, expensive upbringing. Then in comes Otto, grins, dimples, knocks over a chair slaps Peter on the back, rubs his hands and exclaims fatuously: ‘Ja, ja … so ist die Sache!’ and, in a moment, Peter is transformed. He relaxes, begins to hold himself naturally; the tightness disappears from his mouth, his eyes lose their hunted look. As long as the spell lasts, he is just an ordinary person. (107)

Untwisting Peter’s Englishness, in its class-specific neurosis and dejection, effects the metamorphosis into a ‘natural’ pose, an ordinariness of manner, by a manly slap on the back rather than a cut across the buttocks. As a consequence of his aesthetic and physical enjoyment of Nowak’s company, however, Wilkinson’s regeneration also means enjoyment of specifically German pastimes in a largely racially homogeneous environment of ‘real Nordic types’, such as athletic exercises and building sand forts (110). Nowak is more at home in his masculinity and with his sexuality. Homosocial German associations such as the Männerbund channelled homoeroticism that was less easily contained in comparable veteran  Isherwood, Christopher, p. 31.  Ibid., p. 10.

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institutions in Britain, and they continued their existence throughout the 1930s, even though the Nazis identified that affinities cultivated within such groups might undermine their heteronormative sexual policies.72 On the eve of war, Isherwood’s version of this Anglo-German homosexual relationship incorporates in its erotics the desire that the fascist emerge from within the liberal.73 Isherwood’s civilized Englishman harbours a deep desire to allow himself – ‘as long as the spell lasts’ (or the money) – to abandon restraint and enjoy the fascist seduction; to enact in the (economically) controllable and highly scripted sadomasochistic scenario an eroticized role reversal between colonizer and colonized. Like the narrator, Wilkinson cannot really shake off the imperialist stance of his public school and Oxford upbringing. For them, the island’s villages have a ‘romantic, colonial’ air (121), and they embark upon Germany to cure an English post-First World War neurosis through what Isherwood later admitted amounted to ‘sexual colonialism’: ‘By means of [a German lover] he could fall in love with and possess the entire nation’.74 The seductions of these fascist fantasies incorporate shifting positions of domination and submission that are historically contingent and dependent on national stereotypes (the English are repressed imperialists; the Germans are brutal body fanatics). The erotic investment in German culture comes at a price, though. It may offer the accustomed English imperialist some relief from the burden of domination, but it certainly binds him or her into an economy of exchange in which the distinction between the German fascist and the English liberal is increasingly difficult to maintain.

 See Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality, pp. 154–80.   Both Samuel Hynes and William Ostrem have identified a certain ideological opaqueness in Auden and Isherwood’s early dramatic collaborations, which could be read as endorsing fascist as well as leftist ideas. Samuel Hynes, The Auden Generation, London, 1992, pp. 241, 184–5, 310. William Ostrem, ‘The Dog Beneath the Schoolboy’s Skin: Isherwood, Auden and Fascism’, in James J. Berg and Chris Freeman (eds), The Isherwood Century, Madison, 2000, pp. 162–71, p. 170. 74   Carolyn Heilbrun, ‘Christopher Isherwood: An Interview’, Twentieth-Century Literature, 22 (1976): 253–63, at p. 257. Isherwood, Christopher, p. 11. A more direct adaptation of cross-cultural imperialist sexual fantasies is Baron von Pregnitz in Mr Norris: highly influenced by the Boys’ Own tradition of schools stories, he indulges in homoerotic fantasies of homosocial youth culture. After the 1934 Röhm affair, these scenarios are of course not sustainable, hence von Pregnitz’s suicide. Peter Thomas reads the Rügen Island episode in Goodbye to Berlin, with its racist doctors and militarized little boys in sand forts waving swastika flags, as an aberrant Nazi version of von Pregnitz’s harmless fantasy. This interpretation implies, however, that there is a morally justifiable form of imperialism and homoeroticism (British) and a dangerous, morally indefensible version (German). Peter Thomas, ‘“Camp” and Politics in Isherwood’s Berlin Fiction’, Journal of Modern Literature, 5 (1976): 117–30, at p. 125. 72 73

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Uniform Desires: Metaphorical Border Crossings In Stevie Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper, the heroine Pompey Casmilus negotiates national identity in a love affair with the German Karl. In Over the Frontier, Pompey travels to East Prussia and is recruited as a code breaker and spy against the Germans by her love interest Major Tom Sattersthwaite. Smith’s reasons for crossing the frontier into ‘Germanness’ are tethered to increasingly self-critical reflections on British imperialism. Although in Novel on Yellow Paper we come across the puzzling notion that English Blondheit (‘very stiff, stubborn and unyielding’) is different from German Blondheit (‘soft gentle loving and giving’), Germans and Englishmen are not always morphologically readable as distinct.75 Similar to John Heygate’s reflections on the German character in Motor Tramp is Pompey’s discovery that ‘real Germans’ are serious tourists (44), serious eaters (84), suffer from a post-war inferiority complex that makes them cruel (99), strive for national unity (103), and proudly exhibit national symbols (104). On her return journey to England, reflecting on German anti-Semitism, Pompey encounters a fellow passenger whom she easily identifies as a ‘real’ German: Oh I thought of this and all the wicked cruelty in the world. Then I was so unquiet and distracted I began to cry like I would never stop. I didn’t feel embarrassed. I thought the carriage was full of Germans, and crying doesn’t matter in Germany like it does in England, and certainly the man opposite me was looking real German, so I guessed they’d think I’d said good-bye to my boy. And why shouldn’t I cry. (109)

However, the ‘real German’ – who must also have a sentimental romantic heart and tear ducts insensible to repression and decorum to fit the stereotype – turns out to be an Englishman with a penchant for banned modernist novels (he is reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover). The plot of the spy novel of course depends on the very unreliability of categories of national distinctness, and therefore in Over the Frontier, the ‘real Englishwoman’ can only be a good English spy if she impersonates ‘real German’ qualities: the Nordic warrior-soul (126) steeled by ‘the revolting spectacle of fascist discipline’ (90) that will turn her into a soldier of modernism. Appreciation for proto-fascist leadership might support this effort: Pompey eagerly admits her admiration for Lawrence’s Kangaroo and The Plumed Serpent, just as Woolf on her German journey in 1935 was ‘nibbling at Aaron’s Rod’.76 Crossing the line from Englishness to Germanness in Over the Frontier is such a gradual process that it cannot be located in the geographical marker of the ditch that stands for a national boundary (with quite which territory is not really clear). Rather, as both Lyndsey Stonebridge and Romana Huk have argued, 75  Stevie Smith, Novel on Yellow Paper, London, 1980, p. 193. Subsequent references to this edition are cited parenthetically in the text. 76   Woolf, Diary, vol. 4, p. 310.

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the sliding of the narrative mode from realist to surreal underlines the totalitarian fantasy that destabilizes the boundaries between Pompey and the fascists: ‘on whose side are you?’ (157).77 Pompey becomes a sign of ideological instability, most symbolically in the moment of transition, when she dons the greenish-grey uniform that enables her spying. He puts my coat on me, buttoning it up to my chin almost, it is so tight and so constraining I feel that I am in a tight hard sentry box of a coat, but why it cannot be my coat, why my coat was never so tight as this coat is so tight, to hold me tightly, to press upon me and hold me in its tight harsh strength. […] But oh how horrible how horrible is my reflection in the long mirror, and my hat stays quietly in my hands, I have no further thought for it at all. The flames on the hearth shoot up and their savage wild light is reflected at my collar, is held reflected and thrown back with a light that is more savage, but completely savage, with the flick of a savage quick laughter the light is tossed back again from the stars upon my collar and the buckle at my waist. I am in uniform.78

The implication in this near-gothic scene is clearly that this ‘sentry box of a coat’ almost has a life of its own that will compel the wearer to the kind of savage deeds that require dimmed lights and tight tailoring. If it disguises her Englishness it also makes her realize that the uniform merely authenticates and exteriorizes some of the characteristics required by the wearer, bringing to the surface ‘this very barbarismus’ she is supposed to be fighting. The uniform does not so much restrain the body as concentrate the psychological dynamics into the soldierly mindset. There is a similar moment of self-consciousness in John Heygate’s Motor Tramp when the author reflects on his reaction to national semiotics: ‘All this Nazi display, so far from repelling me, merely stimulated my own unsuspected nationalism’.79 What begins as the ‘game’ of the Hitler Salute turns into ‘awe’ when Heygate buys a banner for his car: ‘I only know now what I knew for an instant then what it is to march and die for a banner’.80 Towards the end of Over the Frontier, there is a clearly articulated suspicion – albeit immediately negated  Lyndsey Stonebridge, The Destructive Element: British Psychoanalysis and Modernism, London, 1998, pp. 167–8. Romana Huk, Stevie Smith: Between the Lines, Houndmills, 2005, pp. 120, 163. On a linguistic level, Pompey’s interior monologue, permeated with quotations with or without citation marks, also contains many German terms which are made conspicuous by italics, but her idiosyncratic stream-of-consciousness often also slips into German syntax, as if infected by a foreign thought process, as in ‘the midnight-late writer is to her room departed’ (179). 78  Stevie Smith, Over the Frontier, London, 1980, p. 157. All subsequent citations refer to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text. 79  Heygate, Motor Tramp, p. 179. 80  Ibid., p. 200. 77

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– that the atavistic barbarism of which the Germans are accused is also present in the narrator’s ‘hatred that is not without guilt’: ‘it rouses in me such a fury to destroy, to be so cruel, with more than battle cruelty, to be so cruel, to tread upon the ecstatic face of this idealismus barbarus’ (256; 197). In Orwell’s Coming Up for Air, George Bowling, who recognizes the same old pre-First World War anti-German tropes in 1930s anti-fascist agitation, identifies in the latter’s ferociousness the same kind of brutality habitually ascribed to the Nazis. In a political lecture Bowling envisions the speaker ‘smashing people’s faces in with a spanner. Fascist faces, of course. …Smash! Right in the middle! The bones cave in like an eggshell and what was a face a minute ago is just a great big blob of strawberry jam. Smash! There goes another!’81 Unsurprisingly, in Bowling’s (and Orwell’s) post-war future, it is precisely this ubiquitous endorsement of counterviolence that makes totalitarianism inevitable. Indeed, Smith’s Pompey Casmilus will kill, with spectacular cruelty once she has crossed the frontier into enemy territory, a man dehumanized to a ‘Rat-face’ with beetle eyes and long yellow teeth (252). Is this extraordinary unleashing of violence not uncomfortably close to the ruthlessness Nazism is supposed to let loose?82 Initiated into the secret service by a man who at the strategic moment of induction changes his tone of voice into a mode ‘very authoritatively quiet, as if it would not for one moment occur to this authoritative voice to be disobeyed’ (216), Pompey too begins to change and live up to what the uniform demands. While she keeps maintaining that she intuitively hates it (267), she gradually appreciates the uniform as a ‘cloak of […] privileges’ (271), and it grows on her (260). Even Isherwood’s orientalized Jewish decadent Bernhard Israel in Goodbye to Berlin confesses to the strength of his Prussian contamination when it comes to uniforms: Remember that I am a cross-breed. Perhaps, after all, there is one drop of pure Prussian blood in my polluted veins. Perhaps this little finger […] is the finger of a Prussian drill-sergeant […] You Christopher, with your centuries of AngloSaxon freedom behind you, with your Magna Carta engraved upon your heart, cannot understand that we poor barbarians need the stiffness of a uniform to keep us standing upright. (199)

 George Orwell, Coming Up for Air, Harmondsworth, 1990, p. 156.  The tendency to inscribe ethnic, racial or national difference on the body of the other (the German, the Jew) to make them readable as ‘foreign’ is a kind of phrenological atavism that continues throughout the war, for instance in Agatha Christie’s espionage novel N or M? (1941), where jaw lines and skull shapes are supposedly either Prussian or English. Both Agatha Christie and Stevie Smith locate the appeal of fascism in an ‘unsatisfied personal lust for power’ that particularly simmers in the conservative leadership of the nation. Agatha Christie, N or M?, London, 2001, p. 295. See also Smith, Over the Frontier, p. 272. 81

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Smith is more distrustful than Isherwood of the practice of English liberal democracy, particularly when it comes to exporting ‘Anglo-Saxon freedom’ to overseas colonies. Rather than ‘having been invaded and occupied by the military’ as Gill Plain argues, Pompey’s growing love of uniform exposes her too as one of the ‘poor barbarians’.83 Nor do I think that Pompey ultimately ‘celebrates a different kind of Englishness’ as Phyllis Lassner argues.84 Only after contact with German nationalist ideology (even if in the guise of admiration for British ‘ethical’ imperialism) does Pompey recognize that similar ideas lie at the heart of British imperialism although they may be articulated and implemented with greater subtlety. This is no longer a case of fascist contagion as a result of territorial border crossing; it implies that the English may also always have been a little in love with ‘the stiffness of a uniform’, or at least projected onto the Beastly Hun their own militarist tendencies. In Three Guineas (1938), her searing critique of patriarchy, Virginia Woolf famously elaborated on the ‘connection between war and dress’: Your finest clothes are those that you wear as soldiers. Since the red and the gold, the brass and the feathers are discarded upon active service, it is plain that their expensive and not, one might suppose, hygienic splendour is invented partly in order to impress the beholder with the majesty of the military office, partly in order through their vanity to induce young men to become soldiers.85

Woolf calls this ‘a ridiculous, a barbarous, a displeasing spectacle’ (25) and further sees the same love of dress, titles and pomp as symptoms of aggressive, competitive and ultimately bellicose patriarchal culture. The passage above, however, is interesting not because it dismisses uniform, but because it offers us a sociosexual psychology of uniform (and masculinity) that has now of course long been part of fascist aesthetics.86 Uniform bestows a homosocial, masculine and socially desirable identity. It advertises – promises – an identity that its wearer can exhibit. The specific appeal of the uniform to men is that it reconstructs the body, sans surgery, into the body beautiful. Its erotic appeal was as clear to the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich as it was to Isherwood’s sexually flexible rent boys admiring SA men in Goodbye to Berlin: ‘The sexual effect of a uniform, the erotically provocative effect of rhythmically executed goose-stepping, the exhibitionistic nature of militaristic procedures, have been more practically  Gill Plain, Women’ s Fiction of the Second World War: Gender, Power and Resistance, Edinburgh, 1996, p. 78. For Smith’s ambivalent but highly self-conscious stance towards Jews see Phyllis Lassner, ‘“The Milk of Our Mother’s Kindness Has Ceased to Flow”: Virginia Woolf, Stevie Smith, and the Representation of the Jew’, in Cheyette (ed.), Constructions of ‘the Jew’, pp. 129–44. 84   Lassner, ‘The Milk of Our Mother’s Kindness’, p. 144. 85   Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, London, 1991, p. 25. 86  See Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics, p. 53. 83

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comprehended by a salesgirl or an average secretary than by our most erudite politicians’.87 Hitler, as we have seen, did comprehend this erotically provocative effect and the exhibitionist nature of military procedures, when he presented to the female delegation at the 1936 Party Rally his bare-chested paramilitary Labour Corps as ‘real men’. For Woolf, the uniform is not about women’s desire or even a means of mobilizing female support for male violence, but about male identity shaped by Western traditions of nationalism and imperialism. That Woolf would not locate fascism as a foreign threat to British democracy but, in 1938, interpret it as integral to its most cherished traditions, was one of Bloomsbury’s main gripes about her essay.88 At the close of Over the Frontier Stevie Smith is also deeply suspicious of the kind of ‘national ethos’ that enables imperialism, or what she calls ‘our country’s plundering’ (272). Indeed it is the love of uniform as literal construction of the fascist body beautiful which deconstructs that body as a trope of imperialist nostalgia. When George Orwell argued, in ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ (1941), that ‘hatred of war and militarism’ was a national characteristic (conceding that, in the light of a vast Empire, this must strike the foreign observer as English hypocrisy), he specified that it was the ‘swaggering officer type, the jingle of spurs and the crash of boots’ that the English loathed and associated with the Prussians.89 In other words, it is the vulgarity of exhibiting one’s power in a ‘ridiculous, a barbarous, a displeasing spectacle’ of the body that is supposedly un-English, not power in itself. For Christopher Sidgwick, the regenerated German body in its stiff uniform was merely a making visible of nationalism: ‘we have our flags and uniforms inside our minds, invisible, but we have them as much as nationals of any country have them’.90 English nationalism may have been more internal, more subtle and less vulgar, but, as Smith showed, the existence of a global empire amply demonstrated that it was not necessarily less violent. The English response to the fascist body beautiful and to the corporeal force of fascism is ambivalent, or, as I am more inclined to call it, hysterical. On the one hand, we see the representation of the fascist body beautiful as a palingenetic longing tinged with imperialist nostalgia that is extremely receptive to the kind of   Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, trans. Vincent R. Carfagno, London, 1972, p. 32. The nineteenth-century novel also clearly recognized the allure of the uniformed male even if the romantic encounters are mostly disastrous for the heroines, e.g. Austen’s Lydia Bennet, Thackeray’s Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley, Dickens’s Lady Dedlock, Hardy’s Bathsheba Everdene. 88   See for instance Molly Abel Travis, ‘Eternal Fascism and its “Home Haunts” in the Leavises’ Attack on Bloomsbury and Woolf’, in Merry M. Pawlowski (ed.), Virginia Woolf and Fascism: Resisting the Dictators’ Seduction, Houndmills, 2001, pp. 165–77, at p. 167. 89  George Orwell, ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’, in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, 4 vols, London, 1968, vol. 2: My Country Right of Left, 1940–1943, pp. 56–109, at pp. 60–1. 90   Sidgwick, German Journey, p. 62. 87

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appeal Nazism strives to effect. Here, the German present speaks of the English past, of the heyday of Empire. On the other hand, there are indications of a longing to be relieved – at least temporarily – of the burden of that past, to stop being the one who carries the weight of superiority and supremacy and to submit to the rather novel ‘pain and pleasure’ of being dominated by the ‘pale brown naked flesh’ of the ‘soldiers of modernism’. This split between wishing for domination and desiring submission or relief from the long tradition of the white man’s burden is precisely how the imperial crisis manifests itself in the complex and confused attitudes of British culture to German fascism. This crisis would not just last throughout the 1930s but continued throughout the war, despite massive cultural mobilization, and left its traces in those war-time literary works that deal with ideological instability, treason and espionage during the frightening time of the Blitz.

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Chapter 7

‘The Thinning of the Membrane Between the This and the That’: Englishness and Espionage in Blitz Writing One day something fantastic happened. As we looked at the flats, suspended in mid-air, one of the bedroom doors opened and a young man put his head round. He stepped into the room and went carefully over to the cupboard and began to take suits from their hangers. It was as if, by some strange X-ray, we were looking through the wall of his flat into his home, for the young man was quite at ease taking the clothes from the cupboard. Once he looked out into the road and shouted to someone below: ‘Which of these two?’ And the man in the road shouted back and the man made up his mind. He put several suits over his arm and then walked back to the bedroom door, opened it, walked into the corridor beyond, then carefully shut the door behind him. He had done it all so smoothly and naturally, as if there was nothing strange about walking into his flat on the third floor, with the back wall all blown away. Hilde Marchant, A Journalist’s Impression of the Blitz

One of the clichés of the myth of the Blitz is that Londoners carried on regardless: anything else would have been an acknowledgement of suffering and defeat. The incongruity – some might say the absurdity – of maintaining a mundane routine in the face of catastrophe became a collective coping strategy, officially encouraged and publicly extolled. In this myth, the strangeness of war seems to have consolidated familiar national virtues rather than resulted in collective trauma. Yet for the journalist Hilde Marchant the Blitz bewilders her with thoroughly fantastic or surreal moments. The young man’s highly theatrical behaviour in the quotation above produces a kind of Brechtian V-effect: on the one hand he acts as if his privacy were still intact and as if shutting doors ‘carefully’ still made sense in a blitzed house; on the other hand, his dialogue with the passer-by in the street acknowledges that he is aware of being watched. What Marchant describes as ‘fantastic’ and ‘strange’, we could also call uncanny, in the Freudian sense. The young man contemplating his suits can and cannot acknowledge that the private has become public and the familiar, strange: his behaviour indicates that these opposites have collapsed as a consequence of war.    In Jenny Hartley (ed.), Hearts Undefeated: Women’s Writing of the Second World War, London, 1995, p. 101.

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This chapter is very much concerned with the uncanny effects of war and their fictional representation in the 1940s; with intellectual uncertainty about the shifting or collapsing boundaries between otherwise distinct categories of the strange and the familiar, the past and the present, the other and the self, the enemy and the ally – what Elizabeth Bowen called a ‘thinning of the membrane between the this and the that’. War is uncanny not only because it literally opens up the home to the strange experience of public conflict, but because it reveals the Freudian Unheimlichkeit at the core of this home. Some of the strangeness of war has by now been neutralized by our overexposure to Blitz iconography, which endlessly rehearsed these incongruities and helped to construct via documentary reportage the Barthesian myth of the Blitz: the grand homogenous narrative of English resilience to Nazi aggression in the Second World War as part of the essence of national character that demonstrated emotional unity in moments of supreme crisis. However, when we examine some of the literary representations of the Blitz, we find little mythmaking and certainly no propagandist celebration of ‘strange’ and ‘fantastic’ behaviour but an emphasis on ‘simulacra of behaviour’ (99). In the war fiction of Virginia Woolf, Stevie Smith, Graham Greene, Henry Green (the pseudonym of Henry Yorke) and Elizabeth Bowen, war is the uncanny. While they all describe an insane, incoherent world in which everyday reality has become surreal and disorientating, Graham Greene’s The Ministry of Fear (1943) and Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day (1948) particularly highlight the fictitiousness of wartime reality and wartime identities. Although primarily remembered for their evocative representations of the Blitz, Greene and Bowen depict a world that can only be made sense of through a retrospective revision that produces new meanings because it is a world of consistently indeterminate or contradictory signifiers in which nothing is unequivocal or essential, least of all national identity or ideological affiliation. Therefore their narratives in fact predict the myth of the Blitz as the construction of a ‘common memory’ (99).   Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day, Harmondsworth, 1976, p. 195. All subsequent references to this edition are cited parenthetically in the text.   See Angus Calder, The Myth of the Blitz, London, 1992. I am thinking here of one of the most well-known photographs of the Blitz, that of a London milkman cheerfully making his ‘round’ across a wasteland of rubble after a bombing raid, which adorns the cover of Calder’s book. Equally famous is the image of three male readers unperturbed by the detritus of a collapsed roof, intently perusing the shelves of Holland House Library after a raid in 1941. It became the cover illustration for Robert Hewison’s Under Siege: Literary Life in London, 1939–45, Newton Abbot, 1978 and summarized in one brilliant gesture that literary life indeed continued productively.    In this sense these books also predict the obsolescence of wartime writing. As Mark Rawlinson has argued persuasively, ‘the ways in which the Second World War has been made sense of [by postwar political and cultural discourses] militate against the promotion of its literature to a canon of war writing predicated on the senselessness of war’; Mark Rawlinson, British Writing of the Second World War, Oxford, 2000, p. 206. 

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The iconography of the Second World War reflects the modernity of a total war that mobilizes civilians and threatens populations from the air. Trench imagery was not replaced by the important theatres of war for the British (Dunkirk, El Alamein, the beaches of Normandy) but by the no longer metaphorical home front, particularly the ruinous landscape of bombed London. This time around, war could not simply be fought on foreign fields; it was brought home by the modern technology of the Luftwaffe’s Messerschmitts, Junkers and Focke-Wulfs. While the British government expected an unprecedented scale of casualties, it was relatively unprepared for the most pressing corollary of the London bombing campaigns that epitomized the paradoxes of the home front: the destruction and laying open of homes; the dehousing of significant numbers of the population (as opposed to the evacuation of children to the countryside) and the twice daily migration to and from ersatz homes like mass shelters, tube stations and extra-urban spaces deemed safe(r). With home becoming such a precarious notion, defensive war aims were rarely represented. Frank Newbold’s pastoral images must have seemed almost risible in London’s East End. What, then, did ‘home’ mean? What was its value when it was seemingly indefensible in its materiality of bricks and mortar and so dispensable in its connotations that ‘London could take it’, as the propaganda slogans proclaimed? If this was increasingly a war fought for a better future for Britain, how else could those fighting it situate themselves between a defunct past and an uncertain future other than through a peculiar suspension in deferments, shelvings, tideless states? For Bowen and Greene, war is not something from which the self emerges unvanquished or redeemed; war undoes the self, it erodes its boundaries and perforates its alleged core. The feeling, so common in wartime fiction, that the self is fragmented and its experiences unlikely, is not merely an objective correlative for, literally, mindless destruction; rather, it represents an erosion, or at least a redefinition, of tradition, history and culture – those discourses that anchor the individual in time and (national) place. It stands for a deeper fear of ideological instability, fascist contagion and the loss of ‘Englishness’ – all the fears that myth glosses over. In The Ministry of Fear and The Heat of the Day people suffer from history as they would from a nervous disorder. History here is, of course, not merely the grand narrative of selective events in their retrospectively shaped sequence of cause and effect but also, and maybe even principally, the individual fictional construct of the self as defined against a perceived other. Greene and Bowen offer us two different fictions of alterity only to challenge them again: fascism as ideological otherness and the otherness required by love. As we shall see, neither of these alterities can be sustained as genuine; they have always been auxiliary constructions of the ‘I’ and eventually collapse into it in the same manner in which the heimlich ultimately coincides with the unheimlich.

  See Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’ (1919), in Standard Edition, vol.17, pp. 217–



52.

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War, however, depends on distinct constructs of ipseity and alterity (selfsameness and otherness), and their short-circuiting has political and ideological implications: if it is not altogether clear what distinguishes the self from the (hostile) other, conflict is neither justifiable nor feasible. In the espionage thrillers and invasion novels published before or during the First World War, the Beastly Hun was an omnipresent threat. In the novels of the Second World War the Germans are conspicuous by their absence. They seem a mere abstraction, sometimes realized as a projection of a home-grown malaise. Of course, spy stories with their double agents and double-crosses make the lack of distinction between self and other uncannily clear. In The Ministry of Fear and The Heat of the Day the protagonists get involved with spies and traitors, and therefore become liable to blackmail and manipulation: their loyalties are divided between their country and their lovers. Most importantly, however, in both novels the main plot of ideological betrayal is grafted onto an earlier story of (self-)deception, which accounts for peculiar instabilities of character: if the self is so unstable as to require fictions of subjectivity, how can any sense of alterity (whether amorous or inimical) be ‘real’? By eroding the boundaries between the self and the other, Bowen and Greene pose a range of uncomfortable questions about national identity and the nature of subjectivity, and in that sense their uncanny books are ‘strange’ and ‘fantastic’. Towards a Common Frontier: Propaganda and the Alter(ed) Ego In the last chapters we saw that the 1930s gaze at Germany was often informed by imperialist nostalgia. During the war years, intellectuals and critical analysts of British rhetoric noted a certain proximity between Nazi and imperialist policies that made Churchillian rhetoric ring hollow, even without uncomfortable additional reminders that the concentration camp was a British invention dating from the days of the Second Boer War. In his essay ‘Tolerance’ (1941), E.M. Forster raised the issue of racism: it is very easy to see fanaticism in other people, but difficult to spot it in oneself. Take the evil of racial prejudice. We can easily detect it in the Nazis; their conduct has been infamous ever since they rose to power. But we ourselves – are we guiltless? We are far less guilty than they are. Yet is there no racial prejudice in the British Empire? Is there no colour question?

For Elizabeth Bowen’s wartime lover, the Canadian diplomat Charles Ritchie, war with the Germans did not raise questions about degrees of guilt but sharpened a Benjaminian sense of the cost of ‘civilization’:

   E.M. Forster, ‘Tolerance’, in Two Cheers for Democracy, ed. Oliver Stallybrass, Harmondsworth, 1976, pp. 59–63, at p. 63.

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[Hitler] is the incarnation of our own sense of guilt. When he attacks our civilisation we find him saying things that we have thought or said. In the ‘burrows of nightmare’ such a figure is born, for as in a nightmare the thing that pursues us seems to have an uncanny and terrifying knowledge of our weakness. We spawned this horror; he is the byproduct of our civilisation; he is all the hatred, the envy, the guile which is in us – a surrealist figure sprung out of the depths of our own subconscious.

More than a foreign dictator, Hitler is a projection of familiar traits that might have been channelled into, for instance, imperial racial policies and wartime conduct in previous conflicts. What is initially phrased as a fascist contamination (‘his phrases have got under our skins, affected our language, made it impossible to think without his shadow falling across our thoughts’) assumes more the character of condensation and displacement: an eventual, ineluctable confrontation with the reverse side of human progress. Was Hitler casting his shadow across Churchill’s thoughts, infecting his language, when in the prime minister’s famous ‘Finest Hour’ speech of 18 June 1940 he borrowed the phrases of ‘The Thousand Year Reich’: ‘Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour”.’ Or was he merely pitching one form of imperialism against another? Outside official propaganda, however, in the 1940s imperialist nostalgia gave way to imperialist critique, which made it even harder to be clear about who and what the actual enemy was. That ‘other’ is consequently often a politically expedient term for a perceived (as opposed to an actual) alterity, artificially constructed and temporarily maintained for the purpose of delineating an ideologically useful boundary for the self. I am interested here in the negotiations of identity that happen along what Emmanuel Levinas calls the ‘common frontier’ with the other:10 how are these negotiations represented in Bowen’s and Greene’s    Charles Ritchie, The Siren Years: A Canadian Diplomat Abroad, 1937–1945 Toronto, 1984, p. 92.   Ritchie, The Siren Years, p. 91.    Winston Churchill, Into Battle: Speeches, ed. Randolph Churchill, London, 1941, p. 234. 10   In his definition of metaphysical otherness Levinas distinguishes between identity and a merely perceived otherness that helps delineate identity within the system of selfsameness: ‘The metaphysical other is other with an alterity that is not formal, is not the simple reverse of identity, and is not formed out of resistance to the same, but is prior to every initiative, to all imperialism of the same. It is other with an alterity constitutive of the very content of the other. Other with an alterity that does not limit the same, for in limiting the same the other would not be rigorously other: by virtue of the common frontier the other, within the system, would yet be the same’; Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh, 1990, pp. 38–9.

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war novels? How does their work fit into the historical context of wartime British propaganda? That identity is negotiable, rather than simplified as a clear definition of good and evil, friend or foe, is of historical significance. Some lessons had been learnt from the First World War on how not to run the propaganda machine.11 Exaggerated and unsubstantiated reports of German atrocities would not mobilize broad support from the general population because those fictions had long been discredited by an entire host of studies on the subject in the late 1920s and 1930s.12 Indeed as a consequence of atrocity stories, the term propaganda acquired its current pejorative semantics. In the Second World War propaganda was used to improve morale and prescribe model behaviour to the civilian population, yet it also attempted to construct and consolidate the nation’s identity in opposition to the enemy’s. This posed a problem: while poster designers readily captured Nazi aggression through Hitler’s distinct features or gigantic swastikas, it was less clear (at least for the senior members of the administration) who ‘the people’ actually were and how they should be addressed. Unsuccessful early campaigns became notorious for their patronizing tone, errors of taste and general misjudgement of the intended audience.13 Waterfield’s 1939 poster campaign (‘Your courage, your cheerfulness, your resolution, will bring us victory’), for instance, with its themand-us dichotomy, emphasized class differences and power structures within the country that alienated ‘the people’ from ‘the government’. Similarly ill-judged was Churchill’s order to produce propaganda against defeatist talk and rumours after the Dunkirk debacle with the Silent Column campaign which many found patronizing and tantamount to a gagging order.14 Nor was there general agreement over the identity of the enemy even in political circles: was it all Germans or just the Nazis? The simple solution to this problem was ‘Vansittartism’ (after Lord Vansittart, Chief Diplomatic Advisor to the British Government, whom Duff Cooper permitted to make a series of special 11   However, some invasion fiction was reissued. Like H.G. Wells’s invasion fantasy The War in The Air, When William Came came out as a Penguin mass-market paperback in 1941 at the height of the Blitz. Its republication presumably belongs to the series of propaganda blunders that characterize the early stages of that war. To rally the nation against another threat of German invasion was more important than to reflect on the problematic definition of ‘the nation’ that Saki offered, which excluded the majority of the population. Nor did its offensive anti-Semitism cause any doubts about its suitability for re-release. 12  See Tate, Modernism, History and the First World War, p. 46. 13  See Balfour, Propaganda in War, pp. 190ff. Marion Yass, This Is Your War: Home Front Propaganda in the Second World War, London, 1983, pp. 15, 25. James Aulich, War Posters: Weapons of Mass Communication, London, 2007, pp. 166–8. 14  See Ian McLaine, Ministry of Morale: Home Front Morale and the Ministry of Information in World War II, London, 1979, pp. 31, 82ff. J. Baxendale, ‘“You and I – All of Us Ordinary people”: Renegotiating “Britishness” in Wartime’, in Nick Hayes and Jeff Hill (eds), Millions Like Us? British Culture in the Second World War, Liverpool, 1999, pp. 305ff. See also Angus Calder’s comprehensive The People’s War, London, 2000, and for the contradictory definitions of citizenship Rose’s Which People’s War?

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broadcasts in the autumn of 1940 published as The Black Record), which broadly declared that all Germans were Nazis – at a time when some politicians were still seriously hoping for a successful German uprising against the Nazi leadership. The utility of this simplistic logic was not lost on Dr Goebbels, who swiftly launched an anti-British poster campaign with excerpts from The Black Record that denounced the Germans as ‘criminal butcherbirds’.15 What came to be known as ‘black propaganda’ (the fabrication of rumour and documents), voluntary selfcensorship and the strategic withholding of information were strategies practised on both sides. Compartmentalization was the politically expedient means by which one could ignore the ethical problematics of beating a book-burning, mendacious and totalitarian regime with some of its own weapons: weapons that might also undermine the liberal democracies they were meant to defend.16 As Donald Thomas has argued, many civilians indeed felt that the wartime government’s way of ensuring equality and discipline increasingly resembled the tyrannical measures of continental fascism with its absurd bureaucracy and its draconian enforcements of incomprehensible regulations. As few areas of life remained without official exclamation marks (‘Dig for Victory!’, ‘Eat greens!’, ‘Eat less Bread!’, ‘Keep mum!’, ‘Save now!’, ‘Lend – don’t spend!’, ‘Post early!’, ‘Get a War Job!’), civilians felt as regimented as soldiers.17 Sometimes the Germans were cited as the ‘real’ force of law and order against an often blundering and inefficient wartime administration: ‘The sooner the Gestapo gets here the better!’, ‘Fetch Hitler!’, ‘What’s Rommel’s transfer fee?’. Even if these comparisons were, as Thomas suggests, ‘an instinctive response to authoritarianism,’ sarcastically voicing civilian frustration rather than genuine sympathy for the Nazi regime, it is maybe more important here to note the perspicacity with which these responses identified the proximity between wartime England and fascist Germany: given the opportunity, increased bureaucracy and authoritarianism could transform the ordinary English office clerk into a ‘little Hitler’.18 When propaganda was employed not to consolidate myths in the making but to remind the home front of who the enemy was, it focused as much on the monster abroad as on the foe within. Keeping the two apart posed considerable problems. Pictorially, this interior foe is often represented as a cunningly or unwittingly treacherous femme fatale, be it the prostitute’s skull in Reginald Mount’s famous poster campaign against venereal disease, the series of female gossipers in ‘Telling a friend’ and Fougasse’s ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’ or the glamorous spy in ‘Keep  See Calder, The People’s War, pp. 489–90, and Aaron Goldman, ‘Germans and Nazis: The Controversy over “Vansittartism” in Britain during the Second World War’, Journal of Contemporary History, 14/1 (1979): 155–91. 16   Calder, The People’s War, pp. 501–2. 17  See Aulich’s War Posters, pp. 166–9, for some of the posters in the urban landscape of wartime London to get a sense of their size and ubiquity. 18  Donald Thomas, An Underworld at War: Spivs, Deserters, Racketeers and Civilians in the Second World War, London, 2003, pp. 18, 32. 15

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Mum’ (Figs. 7.1–7.3).19 Exaggerated fears of spies and fifth columnists appear to indicate that the united front of the ‘people’s war’ is more a product of mythmaking propaganda than part of an actual, heterogeneous reality. The ‘Careless Talk’ poster series offers powerful reminders of borderline negotiations between alterity (Hitler) and ipseity (the person who looks at the poster and watches Hitler watching the gossiping women). The careless talkers, while they are not enemies, are not meant to be models of identification for the onlooker. They are conceptually and visually in between the two, a potential ‘I’ as well as a potential ‘other’ somewhere along the common frontier. These posters actually create this in-between space, rather than merely acknowledge it, and make it quite alluring. The anti-rumour campaign implies that gossip relies on either a comfortably intimate, homosocial space or a glamorous, sexually-charged identity. In ‘Telling a friend’ (Fig. 7.1) the power of betrayal and the potential for action clearly lies with the men as the starting and end points in the chain of whispers and casual remarks; the women are merely the leaking vessels of gossip. They become increasingly glamorous, from the innocent blonde to the impressionable brunette with the pearl necklace to the seductively heavy-lidded, black-haired femme fatale who passes on vital information to the thin-lipped, stern traitor. While this poster clearly identifies the last couple as ‘the enemy’, it challenges innocence (telling may be mean, words may have more meanings than one can tell) as well as the ability to know one’s friends, or be a true friend. It is not surprising that for many this sort of campaign produced fear, panic and paranoia by suggesting that friends could not be trusted – nor could one trust oneself – not to become an unwitting fifth columnist. One of Fougasse’s ‘Careless Talk’ posters features a couple in a restaurant whose conversation is spied on: not even the most romantic space should be thought of as ‘safe’ (Fig. 7.4). In ‘Keep mum, she’s not so dumb’ (Fig. 7.3) the scenario of seduction and eavesdropping is meant to alienate the female onlooker from the femme fatale provocatively smiling at her, but the obvious affluence of the spy and the lavish attention she enjoys among the three officers also make her a glamorous model for identification. This kind of propaganda rather precariously relied on the fact that the average woman, asked whether she’d rather be Rosie the Riveter in a munitions factory or the glamorous spy, would naturally be drawn to baggy overalls rather than sparkling diamonds and male attention. (In a similar fashion it would be rather difficult to imagine a male onlooker resisting identification with the suave gentlemen vying for the beautiful spy’s succumbing.) 19   See also Susan Gubar, ‘“This Is My Rifle, This Is My Gun”: World War II and the Blitz on Women’, in Margaret Higonnet (ed.), Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, New Haven, 1987. However, in the Ministry of Information’s fight against rumours of any kind, greater effort was made to appeal to men and women. Indeed, five of the eight posters for Fougasse’s (Cyril Kenneth Bird’s) striking ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’ series depict gossiping men across a range of social spaces and classes: in a pub, a gentleman’s club, a train, outside a house and in a telephone box.

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Figure. 7.1

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Telling a friend may mean telling the enemy, Imperial War Museum

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Figure. 7.2 Fougasse, Careless talk costs lives series, Imperial War Museum

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Figure 7.3

Keep mum, she’s not so dumb, Imperial War Museum

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Figure 7.4

Fougasse, Careless talk costs lives series, Imperial War Museum

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Women had no tenable position in relation to this discourse, whether they talked too much, not at all or to the wrong people. And if they became involved in adventure and secret war work they were definitely in the precarious territory of the common frontier between friend and foe. Yet adventure and secret war work was just what Bowen and Greene had first-hand experience of, and their war fiction makes ample use of woman as the destructive element in war work. Well acquainted and often moving in the same circles in London during the war, both Bowen and Greene worked for the Foreign Office. In his memoirs Greene recounted his sympathy for the defeated Germany during his Oxford days: ‘the thought of being a double agent had occurred to me’.20 The Foreign Office in Berlin even paid for a propagandist journey on which he visited the Palatinate. Much later, in 1941, Greene left for Sierra Leone to work for MI6, and Bowen, shuttling between Dublin and London from 1940 to 1942, sent astute reports to the Foreign Office about the mood in neutral Ireland.21 Both Greene and Bowen worked as ARP wardens during the Blitz, and both conducted extramarital affairs in the heightened atmosphere of bombings and air raids. They tremendously enjoyed London during the war as a kind of amplification of experience: ‘whatever you are these days, you are rather more so. That’s one thing I’ve discovered about this war’, says a character in one of Bowen’s wartime stories, ‘Pink May’.22 Bowen’s letters and essays and Greene’s wartime journal also speak of heady excitement and surreal impressions.23 Although they both clearly belonged to an age of Empire and showed a marked dislike of totalitarian regimes, they were decidedly ambivalent about their own country, and Bowen certainly felt a keen sense of her hyphenated, hybrid Anglo-Irish identity. In their private lives they enjoyed secrecy; in their work, a Jamesian obsession with evil and betrayal. Bowen’s and Greene’s novels and stories of the 1940s often explore the perilous space along the common frontier between the self and the perceived other. They are fascinated by the conflicts of interests and the crises of identity that come with  Graham Greene, A Sort of Life, London, 1999, p. 105.  During the de Valera years of Irish neutrality, Britain contemplated the use of Irish ports and was aware that this could not be done without Irish consent, while also afraid that the Irish might be more sympathetic to a German use of their facilities. Bowen did not think of her activity as spying and espionage is maybe too strong a word for what she did: keeping eyes and ears open when socializing in Dublin. See Robert Fisk, In Time of War: Ireland, Ulster and the Price of Neutrality, London, 1983, passim. Bowen’s reports to the Foreign Office are available in the Public Records Office at Kew and are generously excerpted in Fisk’s book. For a reading of The Heat of the Day that also focuses on ‘the Irish story’ see Neil Corcoran, Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return, Oxford, 2004, pp. 190–6. 22   Elizabeth Bowen, Collected Stories, ed. Angus Wilson, Harmondsworth, 1981, p. 713. 23  See Victoria Glendinning, Elizabeth Bowen: Portrait of A Writer, London, 1999, p. 146. Elizabeth Bowen, The Mulberry Tree, ed. Hermione Lee, London, 1999, pp. 21–5. Graham Greene, Ways of Escape, London, 1999, pp. 101–13. 20

21

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betrayal, secrecy and lies. ‘Who exactly is the enemy and how do I know?’ is the question their protagonists keep asking themselves, and this is of course always the key issue in spy fiction. The other assumes a range of different guises: an enemy, a lover, a mad person and eventually even an estranged form of the self. But ultimately the protagonists remain strangely familiar with this other, who does not exist apart from as an uncanny version of the self – a highly controversial, if not altogether ideologically unsound way of conceptualizing identity in the face of Nazi aggression. The common frontier, it seems, covers too much common ground. Friend or Foe? In The Ministry of Fear Greene’s innocent hero Arthur Rowe unwittingly and repeatedly disrupts a Nazi conspiracy but ends up getting framed for a murder he did not commit. That he falls in love with the Nazi villain’s hapless sister, Anna, complicates matters further. Riddled by guilt for the mercy killing of his terminally ill wife even after years in prison and disoriented by the careful scheming of the conspirators, he loses all memory of his adult life through shell shock. When his memory returns and with it the guilt over killing his wife, he decides to pretend that he is still caught in the bliss of amnesia for the sake of Anna’s happiness. Greene’s Nazi villain is a young Austrian ‘refugee’ called Willi Hilfe (German for ‘help’), who together with his sister works for the Mothers of the Free Nations, a charitable organization that serves as a cover-up for a group of fifth columnists, chiefly made up of artists and intellectuals – Greene’s jibe at Bloomsbury elitism. Hilfe, far from alien internment and trying hard to look like a naturalized Englishman, suffers from a melancholic form of Anglophilia evident in his obsolete idioms, tweedy joviality and fake chivalry: It was as if he had come from an old-fashioned family among whom it was important to speak clearly and use the correct words; his care had an effect of charm, not of pedantry. He stood with his hand laid lightly and affectionately on his sister’s shoulder as though they formed together a Victorian family group.24

Hilfe the Nazi helps himself to what he believes to be an English identity, complete with clipped vowels and a borrowed past, as if he had read too many English crime novels and modelled himself on some of the dapper upper middle-class detectives therein. He tries too hard to be an Edwardian gentleman with a Victorian past, literally offering a series of studied representations of national identity that are like tableaux in a charade. In contrast, the man who will bring about Hilfe’s downfall, the counter-espionage officer Prentice, is old enough to be a ‘real’ Edwardian 24  Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear, Harmondsworth, 1991, p. 43. All subsequent references to this edition are cited parenthetically in the text.

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gentleman with expensive tweeds and antiquated turns of phrase that ‘ring true’. As with Conrad’s use of national signifiers in The Secret Agent, Greene’s work with clichés emphasizes the performativity of national identity but it also establishes degrees of authenticity: while it is grotesque to be a Nazi, it is positively insane to dare to enact Englishness or aspire to ‘naturalization’. Yet there is an alarming suggestion in Hilfe’s impersonation that certain elements of Englishness could be inhabited by a fascist. As Marina Mackay has argued, late modernist writers’ attitudes towards Englishness were often conflicted (even if this awareness never extended to naïve indifference toward the outcome of the war), not least because they were mindful of some of the similarities between the British and the Nazi empires.25 Hitler’s most indulged-in pastime on the Berghof was, after all, the repeated screening of the imperial adventure epic The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1934), an adaptation of Francis Yeats-Brown’s 1930 novel. As Gerwin Strobl demonstrates in The Germanic Isle: Nazi Perceptions of Britain, the continued level of affection for Britain and British culture among ordinary Germans was surprising – and not without embarrassment for the British government. However, the former suffragist Cicely Hamilton, who toured Germany in 1930, noted that the Germans also thought of the British as a militarist nation, as particularly unscrupulous and hypocritical colonizers whose determination to rule they envied.26 For the Nazis, the British Empire provided the strategies that could be further developed in the brutal pursuit of Lebensraum (‘room to live’) from ‘racial inferiors’ in Eastern Europe.27 This may put into perspective the enormous fear of fifth columnists as well as the considerable number of fascist sympathizers in Britain during the war: what had made the fascists attractive in the 1930s now made them uncanny. Some of their ideas were unacknowledgably familiar. The old order of the British Empire and the new Nazi regime appeared to share a preference for clearly defined structures and a range of more or less arbitrarily defined, undesirable forms of otherness as opposed to the hodgepodge heterogeneity of democracy.28 In her polemic Three Guineas Virginia Woolf sceptically noted the similarity between authoritarian structures in England and Germany in the treatment of women – an argument to which she was to return two years later in her essay ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’. In response to a typical letter in The Times demanding that employed women return to home and hearth since they took away jobs from men, she argued:

  Mackay, introduction, Modernism and the Second World War, Cambridge, 2007, passim. 26  Hamilton, Modern Germanies, pp. 218ff. 27  Gerwin Strobl, The Germanic Isle: Nazi Perceptions of Britain, Cambridge, 2000, p. 59. 28  See Adrian Weale, Renegades: Hitler’s Englishmen, London, 1994. Pugh, ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’. Griffiths, Fellow Travellers. 25

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There we have in embryo the creature, Dictator as we call him when he is Italian or German, who believes that he has the right whether given by God, Nature, sex or race is immaterial, to dictate to other human beings how they shall live; what they shall do. […] And what right have we, Sir, to trumpet our ideals of freedom and justice to other countries when we can shake out from our most respectable newspapers any day of the week [fascist] eggs like these?29

Woolf saw the beginnings of totalitarianism as firmly rooted in the complacency of superiority upon which the Empire rested and cited the discourses of religion, Social Darwinism and gender as stereotypical building blocks of this core ideology. Its seeds or ‘eggs’ were already there within imperialism; continental fascism was merely an aggravation, an evolutionary higher stage of the same evil. Greene’s 1940 short story ‘The Lieutenant Died Last’ – more familiar in Cavalcanti’s film version Went The Day Well? – also blurs the boundaries between Germany and England as German parachutists invade the Deep England popularized through Frank Newbold’s pastoral wartime posters. During the Blitz the fear of foreign invasion seemed real enough: in spring 1941 the government issued a leaflet instructing the population in capital letters about proper behaviour in such a case: ‘STAND FIRM’, ‘carry on’.30 Standing firm and carrying on, however, did not gloss over the fact that, for the enemy to have crossed the lines, they must have been standing at least as firm and carrying on as admirably as their British counterparts. The standard closure of spy fiction or invasion films such as Went the Day Well? or The Next of Kin relies on the fact that ipseity and alterity can be re-established. At the same time these genres are also fantasies of the common frontier: the plot depends on the difficulty of telling friend and foe apart. This kind of confusion is partly a result of modern warfare in which the threat comes from the air and via the ether. Sensory perception is no longer reliable to establish identity. It is impossible to assess unequivocally the truth of a broadcast given the level and nature of home propaganda.31 Another of Greene’s war stories, ‘The News In English’ (1940) – a variation on the Lord Haw Haw broadcasts – enacts a similar destabilization of otherness and enmity. For a considerable time, English listeners to Lord Haw Haw’s (William Joyce’s) broadcasts felt his information to be much more accurate than the news they received from the BBC. The Times even paid him the compliment of listing his broadcast in its columns. Greene’s short stories imply that it is equally impossible to distinguish between one’s own troops practising or enemy planes attacking; between a traitor spouting propaganda via the radio or a British spy transmitting secret messages via German radio. In his   Woolf, Three Guineas, pp. 61–2.  See Yass, This Is Your War, pp. 34–5. 31   Greene’s spoof on propaganda work in the Ministry of Information, ‘Men At Work’, comments on the relentless but ineffective regulation of everyday life through a bureaucratic machine; Graham Greene, ‘Men At Work’, Penguin New Writing, 9 (1941): 18–24. 29 30

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analysis of the special aura surrounding the figure of the airman, Mark Rawlinson identifies troubling similarities between the elitist subjectivity cultivated in the RAF and fascist racial policy.32 The association of flying and fascism that was well established by the beginning of war lent itself to allegories of totalitarianism such as Rex Warner’s The Aerodrome (1941).33 Airmen and aeroplanes were ideologically suspect: it seemed difficult to tell which side they were really on. A diary entry by Virginia Woolf on 28 August 1940 illustrates the situation for the civilian: We went out on to the terrace, began playing [bowls]. A large two decker plane came heavily and slowly – L[eonard] said a Wellesley something. A training plane said Leslie. Suddenly there was pop pop from behind the Church. Practising we said. The plane circled slowly out over the marsh & back, very close to the ground & to us. Then a whole volley of pops (like bags burst) came together. The plane swung off, slow & heavy & circling towards Lewes. We looked. Leslie saw the German black cross. All the workmen were looking. It’s a German; that dawned. It was the enemy. It dipped among the fir trees over Lewes & did not rise. Then we heard the drone. Looked up & saw 2 planes very high. They made for us. We started to shelter in the Lodge. But they wheeled and Leslie saw the English sign. So we watched – they side slipped glided swooped & roared for about 5 minutes round the fallen plane as if identifying & making sure – then made off towards London. Our version is that it was a wounded plane, looking for a landing. ‘It was a Jerry sure eno’’ the men said: the men who are making a gun hiding by the gate. It wld have been a peaceful matter of fact death to be popped off on the terrace playing bowls this very fine cool sunny August evening.34

Woolf’s experience of physical threat from the air quite late in the Battle of Britain is marked by a twofold misrecognition, which in the end needs a plausible fictionalization to make it ‘real’. As in ‘The Lieutenant Died Last’ the invader is not recognized as an enemy until they are literally on the doorstep. Woolf’s description brilliantly captures this almost cinematic process of realization in its pace and syntax that leads up to ‘that dawned. It was the enemy.’ When later two more airplanes arrive, they are not at first identified as RAF planes but as some

 Rawlinson, British Writing of the Second World War, pp. 60–7.   In a remarkable reversal, it also deprived RAF veterans of the heroic status they had enjoyed during the war once the devastation wreaked on Germany by area bombing became public knowledge in Britain in the post-war years. 34   Woolf, Diary, vol. 5, p. 313. 32

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threatening reinforcement out to ruin an evening’s blissful game of bowls.35 After the Woolfs and their guests have sheltered from their own country’s air force, they piece together a narrative of the events as ‘our version’. George Orwell reports a similar incident of indeterminate signification in his first war diary: 15 September [1940]: This morning, for the first time, saw an aeroplane shot down. It fell slowly out of the clouds, nose foremost, just like a snipe that has been shot overhead. Terrific jubilation among the people watching, punctuated every now and then by the question, ‘Are you sure it’s a German?’ So puzzling are the directions given, and so many the types of aeroplane, that no one even knows which are German planes and which are our own. My only test is that if a bomber was seen over London it must be a German, whereas a fighter is likelier to be ours.36

This passage shows an almost identical structure to Woolf’s diary entry. Orwell’s last sentence sums up his ‘version’ of events, his narrativization or deciphering of ambiguous signs. The necessity for interpretation arises because the signifiers – literally ‘the sign’, as Woolf calls it, of each country painted on the aircraft – are not easily identified. A plane in itself is an indeterminate signifier and what precisely goes on during the Battle of Britain seems to be anyone’s guess. In Bowen’s The Heat of the Day the threat of indeterminacy and misrecognition is even closer to ‘home’ and invades the bedroom. The heroine Stella Rodney discovers through the shady counter-espionage officer Harrison that she has been having a two-year relationship with a double agent, Robert Kelway. Stella, like Bowen, is Anglo-Irish, and by implication her identity is suspended and complicated in this hyphenated state of shuttling between England and Eire. Much of the novel revolves around Stella’s protracted negotiation between love for one’s country and love for an individual: will she give in to Harrison’s sexual blackmail and go to bed with him in order to give Kelway a chance to escape, or will she confront her lover and make him give himself away? Kelway is a survivor of the evacuation of the Expeditionary Force at Dunkirk, which has left him with a disabling limp; equally crippling are his middle-class origins in ‘a man-eating house’ with an army of garden gnomes, concealed drives, fake beams and ‘swastika-arms of passage leading to nothing’ (257–8). At the end of the novel Kelway explains his rationale for treason to Stella: ‘I was born wounded; my father’s son. Dunkirk was waiting there in us – what a race! [Spying] utterly undid fear. It bred my father out of me, gave me a new 35

  Playing bowls was Woolf’s panacea during the early stages of the war but this in itself carries connotations of the myth of Sir Francis Drake’s reaction to the Armada’s imminent attack, and maybe we should also read her concluding sentence for this entry in the light of this historical connotation. 36  Orwell, Collected Essays, vol. 2, p. 373.

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heredity. […] Who wants to monkey about? To feel control is enough. It’s a very much bigger thing to be under orders.’ ‘We’re all under orders; what is there new in that?’ ‘Yes, can you wonder they love war. But I don’t mean orders, I mean order.’ ‘So you are with the enemy.’ ‘Naturally they’re the enemy; they’re facing us with what has got to be the conclusion. They won’t last, but it will. (272–3.)

It is important here that Kelway refuses to collaborate in the retrospective Dunkirk myth that rewrites what Churchill called a ‘colossal military disaster’ as the defiant victory of the little boats, the gallant success of the daring underdog and plucky amateur against the highly mechanized and efficient German Wehrmacht. Like many soldiers evacuated from Dunkirk who believed themselves abandoned and let down by the government and the socially superior officer class, he links this defeat to a generational and, implicitly, a class problem (precisely the social divide that National Socialism attempted to eradicate and to reconstruct into an ideological and racial divide).37 Kelway’s weak father, inhabiting a mere ‘fiction of dominance,’ stands for a decrepit British Empire whose lack of virility and conviction will logically lead to the disaster of Dunkirk. While the Nazis, Kelway implies, are merely the temporary tool to conclude British imperial history, their ideology will breed a New Order to launch a new imperial age. Bowen leaves Kelway’s ideology rather oblique, affiliating him to neither communism nor fascism, and this significantly shifts the focus of treason from a specific totalitarian ideology to the imperialist element all totalitarian regimes incorporate. Kelway’s fascination with totalitarianism is uncanny precisely because his betrayal is motivated by a foreign ideology that utilizes familiar forms of imperialism. As Kelway’s home and home country cannot offer him a convincingly powerful fiction to shape his identity, he will, like the British observers of Nazism in the 1930s, look for his country’s past in a foreign future. For him, the strange has become familiar in the effect of the uncanny discussed earlier: ‘heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich’.38 Isn’t the semantic ambivalence Freud mentions here a kind of common frontier between ipseity and alterity, a frontier that, once crossed, collapses opposition into sameness? As Freud argues in ‘The Uncanny’, ‘the

37   Similar scepticism of the mythmaking following Dunkirk can be found in Woolf’s diary entry on Harry West of 22 June 1940, where she questions ‘the brave, laughing heroic boy panoply which the BBC spreads before us nightly’. Diary, vol. 5, p. 298. In The People’s War, Calder also cites the troops’ angry silence over the disappointment and wounded pride following the Dunkirk debacle as one of the factors that made the retrospective myth of defiance possible (pp. 109–10). Neil Corcoran sees Dunkirk propaganda as the real reason for Kelway’s treason; Elizabeth Bowen, p.176. 38   Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, vol. 17, p. 226.

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prefix “un” [un-] is the token of repression’.39 Repression (Verdrängung) and its lexical equivalent, negation, function as a displacement, literally a border crossing from the integrative same to the (artificial) space of the other. The heimlich then manifests itself in the very Unheimlichkeit of middle-class, home-bred ideological madness because the home is always at the core of the unfamiliar experience. Like Woolf in Three Guineas, Bowen asks us, how can we sustain constructs of ideological alterity if traitors are bred at home and if our own history lends itself to Nazi adaptations? Bowen argues that the absence of a past that bestows a firm sense of identity is a particular middle-class problem. It accounts for a variety of crimes, from lack of taste to emotional cruelty and, eventually, treason. As in her earlier novels The House in Paris (1935) or The Death of the Heart (1938), Bowen’s contempt for this section of English society is patently clear when the Anglo-Irish Stella meets Kelway’s family and endures the horror vacui of having tea with them: Stella pressed her thumb against the edge of the table to assure herself this was a moment she was living through – as in the moment before a faint she seemed to be looking at everything down a darkening telescope. […] The English, she could only tell herself, were extraordinary – for if this were not England she did not know what it was. You could not account for this family headed by Mrs Kelway by simply saying they were middle class, because that left you asking, middle of what? She saw the Kelways suspended in the middle of nothing. She could envisage them so suspended when there was nothing more. (114)

The middle classes (entirely independent of any determinate signifiers because they are made up of indeterminacy itself: ‘middle of what?’) are only tethered to reality by virtue of their ‘Englishness’, by the fictions that go with national identity. Englishness itself seems to be a sufficient guarantor of existence, a matrix upon which other fictions depend. Stella’s image of the Kelways at tea suspended in a vacuum of space and time is an almost postmodern science-fiction tableau, and yet it is in itself born out of the anxious exile of Stella’s own Anglo-Irishness. She too feels the overwhelming need for an anchor to the past and the prospect of continuity, which is why she helps retrieve for her son Roderick the heritage of a Big House in Ireland. The English, ‘so suspended when there was nothing more’, simply exist by imagining themselves, Stella implies, unaware that she herself ‘envisages’ this tableau and that she herself is suspended in the middle of an impossible situation. She constructs the English middle class as constructing itself. But is this more unreal than the permanently hyphenated state of being Anglo-Irish? Stella’s visit to Kelway’s family home Holme Dene is intended to psychologize Kelway’s betrayal for his lover as much as for the reader: this is ‘where rot could start’, as Harrison says (131). One of the telling ironies of the Holme Dene tea 39

 Ibid., p. 245.

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party is its revelation of authoritarian familial power structures. After a series of faux pas from Stella, Kelway’s mother tells her granddaughter Anna that ‘Mrs Rodney is free not to eat cake if she doesn’t want to: that is just what I mean by the difference between England and Germany’ (113). Stella Rodney is of course not free at all to eat or not eat what she likes or does not like, nor is anyone else in this house, just as there is no real difference between England and Germany in Holme Dene. The middle-class home, with its reproduction furniture, its concealed drives and its army of garden gnomes, provides an identity that is clearly recognizable as fiction, as the suspension in nothingness. In its suburban variety it gave rise to mockery in Orwell’s Coming Up for Air (1939), and concerned voices from within the medical establishment identified it as a breeding ground for neurosis and dangerous political ideologies.40 Visiting his old room, now a shrine to a boyish past, Kelway and Stella find it entirely devoid of personality and life, as if the mementos in it have vampirized Kelway’s life (verunheimlicht it, as it were) rather than merely representing it: ‘Each time I come back again into it I’m hit in the face by the feeling that I don’t exist – that I not only am not but never have been’ (117). As in The Death of the Heart, the furniture has a life of its own; it preserves the past by devouring the people. But that past and his part in it have long been renounced by Kelway: ‘If to have gone through motions ever since one was born is, as I think now, criminal, here’s my criminal record. Can you think of a better way of sending a person mad than nailing that pack of his own lies all round the room where he has to sleep’ (118). These lies, we are to understand, are photographic documents of the aspirations of his class, stereotypical moments of happiness, reminiscent of the artificiality of the ‘Victorian family group’ tableau in Greene’s novel. But unlike Willi Hilfe, Kelway is not an evil Nazi but a likable character, whose suffering in this man-eating house we can understand. As Hermione Lee admits, Bowen’s explanation of treachery is ‘peculiarly unstable and strange’ because it betrays a fascination with spying and secrets and a great deal of sympathy with Kelway’s disaffected feelings for his country, while trying to convey the abject horror of his actions.41 The novel does not offer Kelway an alternative to betraying the familiar forms of fascism (Holme Dene) to the foreign ones (the Nazis), when the two have too many common frontiers. While it is not in sympathy with fascism itself, it clearly shares its character’s contempt for the middle class and the moral failures of his country. It is not merely the treatment of treason that is rather strange and unstable. Bowen’s concept of subjectivity in this novel is represented as the product of ‘stories’, as both Mark Rawlinson and Neil Corcoran have argued.42 In a time of 40  Stephen Taylor, ‘The Suburban Neurosis’, The Lancet, 26 March 1938: 759–61, at p. 761. 41  Hermione Lee, Elizabeth Bowen, London, 1999, pp. 173–4. 42  Rawlinson, British Writing of the Second World War, pp. 99–103. Corcoran, Elizabeth Bowen, pp. 168–78.

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censorship and propaganda, secret war work and espionage, retaining control over one’s own fictions is not always possible or even desirable. One simply cannot ‘own’ fictions; they attach themselves at convenient or inopportune moments, or they are proliferated when politically expedient, conducive to romance or helpful in constructing useful categories of masculinity or femininity. In the Second World War, propaganda aimed at establishing a taxonomy of citizenship that (re)defined British national identity as sacrificial, communal and patriotic, and yet sufficiently distinct from Nazi-German ‘character’ and state organization (and that has survived in the image of ‘the people’s war’ precisely because it located victory in the superior morality of national character rather than superior military strategies, materiel and resources). Bowen is very good at demonstrating how official and private fictions coalesce, and where they collide. Her two factory workers Connie and Louie represent the realistic and the naive audience of wartime propaganda. When Connie says with as much irony as grit, ‘What gets you anywhere is character’ (192), what she means is the resolute determination it takes for women to negotiate contradictory messages and ambivalent identities; to manage the tightrope walk between being a decent ‘woman of Britain’ and a flighty ‘goodtime girl’.43 Louie, on the other hand, feeds on a diet of ‘true’ human stories in the newspapers that provide her with the ‘right’ point of view and a patriotic index of identities: Was she not a worker, a soldier’s lonely wife, a war orphan, a pedestrian, a Londoner, a home- and animal-lover, a thinking democrat, a movie-goer, a woman of Britain, a letter writer, a fuel-saver, and a housewife? She was only not a mother, a knitter, a gardener, a foot-sufferer, or a sweetheart – at least not rightly. Louie now felt bad only about any part of herself which in any way did not fit into the papers’ picture; she could not have survived their disapproval. (152)

It is less Louie’s lack of self-knowledge and ‘character’ that Bowen ironizes; there is a nagging suspicion that Louie is perhaps rather representative of an apolitical majority that, according to mass observation, remained quite baffled by, if not altogether uninterested in, the conflict and had to be mobilized out of their individualist private sphere into clearly articulated forms of citizenship. Even those writing about war seemed to have got the enemy quite wrong: ‘To judge from most war books, Britain is fighting this war to protect the world against Auden and Picasso, the Jews and any form of collectivism’, commented mass observation’s Tom Harrison in his analysis of early war writing.44 The Germans, Louie is told (presumably by the papers), ‘swallow anything they are told’: ‘I 43   For the contradictory models of wartime gender identity see Rose, Which People’s War?, pp. 71–151. Lucy Noakes, War and the British: Gender, Memory and National Identity, London, 1998. 44   Tom Harrison, ‘War Books’, Horizon 4/24 (1941): 416–37, at p. 420.

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know I saw where it said how they do have papers, but not like our ones with ideas. It said how to get them through the war they have to kid them along, but how the war makes us think’ (192). The opposite, of course, is true: war requires the suspension of thought, truth and critique. Much of Bowen’s novel undermines any easy them-and-us dichotomy. Inhabiting prescribed official models of citizenship and identity actually makes the distinction between ‘the Germans’ and ‘the British’ harder to maintain. All three main characters in The Heat of the Day are to some extent unstable, indeterminate signifiers. When Harrison tries to blackmail Stella into sexual favours, ringing her up ‘like the Gestapo’ (33) or surveying her flat ‘like a German in Paris’ (44), he too betrays fascistic, imperialist traits. Like Bowen herself, Stella is employed in ‘secret, exacting, not unimportant work’ (26) for the Ministry of Information, and in her choice and ability to keep mum about Harrison’s tip-off, she shows nerve and a considerable taste for duplicity and secrecy.45 Bowen’s double agent Kelway is not unusual either in his un-English pessimism, postulating a kind of Freudian death-drive for his country which both conservative and leftwing writers at the time diagnosed as well. This had less to do with increased authoritarianism than with crippling domestic problems coupled with ineffective or insufficient authoritarianism, that is with a crumbling Empire and a lack of spirit. Evelyn Waugh commented on a diseased society by romanticizing the past in Brideshead Revisited. In his wartime writings George Orwell portrayed a British intelligentsia waiting for an apocalypse as a corollary of a whole range of failures, among them chiefly lack of moral stamina, the effeteness of the ruling classes and the vices of capitalism. Graham Greene stated in his 1940 essay ‘At Home’: why one feels at home in London – or in Liverpool, or Bristol on any of the bombed cities – [is] because life there is what it ought to be. If a cracked cup is put in boiling water it breaks, and an old dog-toothed civilization is breaking now.46

This homeliness is apocalyptic gloom, rather than the propagandist esprit de corps of ‘Your Britain – Fight for It Now!’. Between the lines of such statements lives the desire for renewal that cannot always be stated because it might sound too much like any continental ‘new order’ against which one is fighting. What 45

 Indeed as Adam Piette argues, the Kelway–Stella–Harrison triangle represents the political and ideological complexities between Germany, Eire and the British Empire of which Bowen was fully conscious; Imagination at War: British Fiction and Poetry 1939– 45, London, 1995, pp. 168–72. Initially Bowen viewed Eire’s neutrality as ‘its first major independent act’ and defended the convictions behind it in her 1941 essay ‘Eire’; Bowen, The Mulberry Tree, pp. 31ff. ‘Eire’ does not substantially deviate from her reports for the Ministry of Information, but by 1942 Bowen had changed her mind once the situation in Europe deteriorated and the threat of invasion became more real. 46  Graham Greene, Collected Essays, London, 1969, pp. 447, 450.

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is reassembled from the fragments of the past depends on who misrecognizes them in the present. Waugh, Orwell, Bowen and Greene all remember an imperial England, which is sometimes less real, but more ideological, idealized and ossified by nostalgia. Similarly, Simon Featherstone has identified the myth of a pastoral past in the trope of Deep England as one such construct of nostalgic identity used in home-front propaganda as well as in the literature of the period.47 However, unlike Greene’s dejection about the state of England (or Britain), Bowen’s argument about Irish independence is born out of a greater, deep-seated ambivalence about this idealized past glory and of an awareness of the way in which colonial history complicates wartime loyalties: ‘I could wish that the English kept history in mind more, that the Irish kept it in mind less’.48 Aren’t the themes of emotional betrayal, moral turpitude and divided loyalties that we typically find in the spy genre, the symptoms of working through the melancholic conflict with one’s own country?49 In an essay on the necessity for the writer to explore uncertainties and ignore allegiances Bowen indeed quotes Greene, the contemplator of double agency: ‘“Isn’t disloyalty as much the writer’s virtue,” asks Graham Greene, “as loyalty is the soldier’s?”’50 What comes across as a lack of loyalty, I would argue, is often an uncomfortable realization of the lack of genuine difference between Germany and England, or more precisely, an admission of unwelcome similarities that Virginia Woolf, Stevie Smith and George Orwell had already pointed out. We remember Pompey Casmilus’s guilty reflections about the British Empire and its attendant hypocrisy. In Novel on Yellow Paper, Pompey argues with her German lover Karl over Kitchener’s sacrilegious scattering of the bones of the Mahdi after the battle of Omduman. This sets in motion an increasingly self-critical discourse on imperial policy that spills over into Over the Frontier:

47  Simon Featherstone, ‘The Nation as Pastoral in British Literature of the Second World War’, Journal of European Studies, 16 (1986): 335–77. 48   Quoted in Patricia Craig, Elizabeth Bowen, Harmondsworth, 1986, p. 100. 49   See Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ ([1915] 1917), Standard Edition, vol. 14, pp. 237–58. As Roy Foster argues convincingly, Bowen’s autobiographical works during the war years, the reticent Seven Winters about her Dublin childhood and her family history Bowen’s Court (both 1942), appear to consolidate her Irishness at a time when she moved very much in the space of the common frontier between Eire and England; Foster, The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland, London, 2001, p. 153. However, in an interview with ‘the Bellman’ for Sean O’Faolain’s The Bell she defiantly asserted that ‘All my life I’ve been going backwards and forwards between Ireland and England and the continent, but that has never robbed me of my nationality. I must say it’s a highly disturbing emotion’; Meet Elizabeth Bowen, The Bell, 4 (1942): 425. Quite what is so highly disturbing – being Irish or flitting about so much – is not really clear here. Her most important essays, ‘London, 1940,’ ‘The Big House’ and ‘Eire’, show allegiances to both countries. 50   Bowen, The Mulberry Tree, p. 60.

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Is then power and the lust for power the very stuff of our existence, the prop of our survival, our hope for the future, our despair of the past? And if we cannot achieve in our individualities this power are we any less guilty if we pursue it, or again, […] identify ourselves with a national ethos, take pride in our country, in our country’s plundering, or, if the mood takes us, in our country’s victories upon other fields less barren, in science, art, jurisprudence, philosophy? (271–2)

Subsequently Pompey has to admit that her excerpted memoirs of Prince Max von Baden exhibit, in their patriotism and in their admiration for the British Empire and its ‘ethic imperialism’, a national arrogance that is ‘my country’s successful delinquency’ (272; my italics). As Phyllis Lassner argues, Pompey’s process of self-questioning reveals the ‘historic moment as riven with a unique fascist danger’ for both Germany and England.51 Similarly, in his essay ‘Notes on Nationalism’ (1945), Orwell answers Pompey’s rhetorical question above by juxtaposing atrocities committed in the name of the British Empire with those committed by the Nazi regime, arguing that political actions of the most reprehensible kind are always justified by political expediency sanctioned by this ‘national ethos’, while condemned if committed by someone else.52 In other words, British democracy coupled with British imperialism was capable of selectively deploying and selectively forgetting its proximity to totalitarian measures. In his famous essay on Englishness, ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’, Orwell had even claimed that ‘The phrase that Hitler coined for the Germans, “a sleepwalking people”, would have been better applied to the English’ for they appeared to demonstrate even greater ‘emotional unity’ in moments of crisis.53 Significantly, Greene’s cynical Nazi villain Hilfe asks Arthur Rowe, ‘Do you think you are so different from us?’ (215). Indeed, the most ‘English’ of Greene’s characters in The Ministry of Fear is the most fascistic one. Prentice, with his blend of Edwardian tweeds and pre-war authoritarianism, explicitly endorses torture, public deception, secrecy and coercion into ‘national duty’: ‘My dear chap you are conscripted for your country’ (168).54 With so little to distinguish between the Nazi attempting to ‘export’ his corporate state and the dapper detective epitomizing the virtues of empire and adventure, one wonders indeed if it is not inevitable that one falls in love with the other side.

51

  Lassner, ‘The Milk of Our Mother’s Kindness’, pp. 143–4.  Orwell, Collected Essays, vol. 3, p. 290. 53   Collected Essays, vol. 2: pp. 58, 67. 54  See Brian Diemert, Graham Greene’s Thrillers and the 1930s, Montreal & Kingston, 1996, pp. 170ff. 52

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Historical Romance: Treason, Myth and Reconstruction For Greene and Bowen, love and war happen on the same battlefield of fictitious selves and others. Love is like spying because it relies on a perceived other whose boundaries it must dissolve for it to merge with the self in a romantic fiction of common frontiers. Love depends on alterity but strives to abolish it at the same time. The Heat of the Day and The Ministry of Fear feature rather problematic love stories: Stella Rodney and Arthur Rowe love spies and continue to love and protect them after their cover is blown. Jacqueline Rose has argued that the reader holds so much sympathy for Bowen’s protagonist that, like Stella, he or she might eventually be quite indifferent to her lover’s dangerous ideological affiliations.55 The same is true for Greene’s hero: does it matter to us that Anna Hilfe is a Nazi spy masquerading (albeit coercively) as an Austrian refugee? The lovable Nazi spy is maybe a guilt-ridden overcompensation of Bowen and Greene’s own intelligence and extramarital activities during the war, which involved a considerable amount of duplicity. Both novels work hard to make us forget that the objects of desire are traitors, and are therefore rather unsettling in terms of their ideological ‘soundness’. What is even more troubling, however, is that in each narrative it is the woman who is willing to favour romantic love over political loyalty: Stella eventually offers herself to Harrison in exchange for her lover’s freedom and Anna Hilfe begins to subvert her brother’s plots to save Arthur Rowe. As in the propaganda posters of gossiping careless talkers, women are the weakest link in the fight against an enemy at home and abroad. They become a perilously ambivalent entity during the war, objects to fight for and against. Women cannot win in this situation: if they admit to attracting a Nazi or being affiliated with one, they become enemies through their sexual availability or feminine weakness; if they defend their love, they become traitors by association – how else can they be susceptible to the wiles of a Nazi? Both Arthur Rowe and Stella Rodney can only love spies because it is the very in-between-ness of their love objects that is both an effect of and a stabilizing factor for their own identity. In the end, love becomes a form of doubling, through which those who love spies turn into spies, too. The madness of love is therefore its endless self-perpetuating mimesis. Unsurprisingly, Bowen’s heroine and Greene’s hero are amorous traitors themselves. They have built their lives around secrets and lies. Rowe poisoned his ill wife, not so much to relieve her from suffering as to free himself from watching her pain. For a considerable time he deludes himself about the corrosive effects of pity while, as Greene makes clear, indulging in a monstrous form of egotism. Stella Rodney, on the other hand, upholds a facade of farouche adultery because she prefers this narrative to the alternative of being the abandoned wife. What the narrator in The Heat of the Day says about Stella and Robert’s affair is also true for Anna and Arthur’s: ‘War at present worked as a thinning of the membrane 55   Jacqueline Rose, ‘Bizarre Objects: Mary Butts and Elizabeth Bowen’, Critical Quarterly, 41/1 (2000): 75–85, at p. 77.

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between the this and the that, it was a becoming apparent – but then what else is love?’ (195). In these novels love equals war – not only in the overtly sexual way of Henry Green’s Caught, but also in a more metaphorical fashion. Love is like war because it relies on an artificial construction of alterity; it thrives along the common frontiers with the other to the extent that boundaries appear to be entirely absent between ‘the this and the that’. As Maud Ellmann observes, Bowen’s war fiction alerts us to the leaks in, rather than the structures of, containment.56 This does not just apply to psychic structures of subjectivity, but to the political ideologies that are mobilized in wartime to shore up such subjectivities into ‘citizenship’. Hence when Kelway the spy eventually matches Stella the liar, they both receive our sympathy. Greene even goes one step further, ultimately ‘releasing’ his wife-murdering spy-catcher Arthur Rowe into the arms of his new lover, the ‘traitor’ Anna Hilfe. Anna, who knows about Arthur’s past, pretends not to know for the sake of their relationship, just as Arthur pretends to have been shell-shocked out of the memory of killing his wife. This is where Greene also redefines the novel’s title. ‘The Ministry of Fear’ initially describes the machinations of anxiety, suspicion and deceit through which totalitarian regimes operate. At the novel’s close, the ideological threat has infiltrated the private sphere and the lovers can from now on only talk in censored conversations: They sat for a long while without moving and without speaking; they were on the edge of their ordeal, like two explorers who see at last from the summit of the range the enormous dangerous plain. They had to tread carefully for a lifetime, never speak without thinking twice; they must watch each other like enemies because they loved each other so much. They would never know what it was not to be afraid of being found out. (221)

The redefinition of seemingly clear boundaries between corrosive pity and egotistical cruelty, treason and loyalty, love for one’s country and love for a person, eventually turns the lovers into spies and enemies, not in spite of, but because of, their love. And the ‘enormous dangerous plain’ of the future really is the minefield of the past. In both novels love depends on gaps, silences, on the ‘consistency from the imperfectly known and the not said’ (99), on the loss of historical beginnings in the palimpsests of romance. In the 1945 preface to her short story collection The Demon Lover, Bowen accounts for the dream-like quality of life during the Blitz with a lack of boundaries and a literal as well as metaphorical sense of fragmentation: I felt one with, and just like, everyone else. Sometimes I hardly knew where I stopped and somebody else began. The violent destruction of solid things, the 56   Maud Ellmann, ‘Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadowy Fifth’, in Rod Mengham and N. H. Reeve (eds), The Fiction of the 1940s, Basingstoke, 2001, p. 4.

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explosion of the illusion that prestige, power and permanence attach to bulk and weight, left all of us, equally, heady and disembodied. Walls went down; and we felt, if not knew, each other. […] People whose homes had been blown up went to infinite lengths to assemble bits of themselves – broken ornaments, odd shoes, torn scraps of the curtains that had hung in a room – from the wreckage. In the same way, they assembled and checked themselves from stories and poems, from their memories, from one another’s talk.57

Amongst the large-scale destruction, Bowen counts the traditional values upon which that solid thing, Englishness, is predicated: family history and the demarcations of the class system.58 Houses now lose their facades and people transcend their material limits; they no longer ‘stop’ somewhere, but merge into one another, assume hitherto untried fusions, become indeterminate. As the familiar becomes unfamiliar, so the unfamiliar, the literal stranger in the street, assumes intuitive familiarity: ‘we felt, if not knew, each other’. We remember the man in the bombed house requesting advice from a passer-by in the street about which suit to pack. To restore boundaries in this hallucinatory disembodiedness one requires the memory of a past wholeness: people ‘assemble bits of themselves’ from the wreckage, from the fragments of literary history and from the construct of language. In January 1941 Virginia Woolf sought wholeness in the London Library after a disturbing walk through ruined streets where ‘all that completeness [had been] ravished and demolished’.59 The process of rebuilding lives does not start with bricks and mortar, but through language and fictions of identity, as if the Lacanian mirror stage were relived on a grand scale, with debris as a kind of ersatz screen. This means, of course, repeating another process of misrecognition in which the solid object becomes an objective correlative for the self. The structure of Greene’s The Ministry of Fear re-enacts a similar process of explosion, fragmentation and reassembling, reducing ‘The Unhappy Man’ to ‘The Happy Man’ (who lost his memory): negation again equals repression as happy and un-happy relate to one another like familiar and un-familiar. Rowe regains his memory in ‘Bits and Pieces’ until he is ‘The Whole Man’ again who fakes being ‘The Happy Man’. Ahead of him lies an insane life of marital espionage. However, this should not gloss over the fact that rebuilding identity is bound up with revisiting (and revising) the past. As such, it is inevitably an   Bowen, The Mulberry Tree, pp. 95, 97.   Charles Ritchie cites a similar sentiment about the impermanence of solid structures embodying class and tradition in The Siren Years: ‘This overnight disappearance of the brick and mortar framework of existence must send a shock deep into the imagination. These high explosions and incendiaries are like the fallings stars and blazing comets – noted of old as foretelling great changes in the affairs of man’ (p. 93). Note also the aestheticization of the war-torn urban landscape to which Ritchie is prone, like Bowen and Green and many wartime writers. 59   Woolf, Diary, vol. 5, p. 353. 57

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act of Nachträglichkeit and mythmaking. At the end of Bowen’s novel, Kelway asks of Stella before he attempts to escape, ‘if you can come to remember what never happened, to live most in the one hour we never had’ (288). He pleads for a strategy of mythmaking with which Stella is already familiar. What he requests, in simpler terms, is to forget the complexity of a relationship in which those attracted to spies and traitors become spies and traitors themselves; in which otherness always gradually and uncannily transforms itself into sameness. If Stella and Kelway’s relationship henceforth exists in the mythical hour they never had (like all great love stories), it will exist as a collation of negated potentialities, of ever-present others in a ‘monument to absence’ that at the same time denies that absence.60 Identity is not just factuality but also potentiality and negativity. If the novel is about ‘character in flux’ as Phyllis Lassner argues, then this flux is the shifting common frontier between self and other.61 As a consequence of this uncanny instability of definitions and boundaries, lovers become enemies and enemies, lovers. Kelway’s request to remember what had never been might just predict the process of restoration as a return to a ghostly past, indicating a distinct feature of British post-war culture: a nostalgic obsession with a partly mythical moment of consolidated national identity and the shadows of Empire. The myths we construct about ourselves are as ‘true’ as the actual irrevocable facts because they describe a mood, a desire. Bowen also argues this for the historical context of the war in her 1969 review of Angus Calder’s The People’s War, when she comments that his debunking of the myth of the Blitz does not create a clearer picture of actual events, but deprives London of its wartime atmosphere: ‘a picture presented in terms of the actualities only would be a false one; inseparable from happenings are the mood, temper and climate of their time’.62 Both Bowen and Greene suggest that the strange moments we have never had are perhaps the ones with which we are most familiar because they have always been at the core of our subjectivity, as its central fiction or myth. The otherness we demand of and subsequently deny our lovers (and enemies) therefore merely cloaks the common frontier along which we have moved all along, and this is what makes The Ministry of Fear and The Heat of the Day so strange and fantastic. It also explains why the Germans are so incidental in both novels and yet so much a part of a nostalgic English post-war national identity. The story of the war in the post-communist, post-memorial, post-9/11 era is beginning to shake up some of these post-war myths as we are on the cusp of a transition from the era of testimony to the era of re-imagining.63 The shift in   Plain, Women’s Fiction of the Second World War, p. 167.   Phyllis Lassner, Elizabeth Bowen, Basingstoke, 1990, p. 134. 62   Bowen, The Mulberry Tree, p. 183. 63   See Petra Rau, ‘The War in Contemporary Fiction’, in Marina MacKay (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Literature of the Second World War, Cambridge, 2009, pp. 207– 19. 60

61

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historiographical literary and cultural reconstruction, and consequently in AngloGerman relations, has less to do with ‘the Germans’ and more to do with England’s place in Europe and in the world, and with its changing self-definition. The story of this transition, however, must be the focus of another book.

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Index

adventure fiction 12, 14, 19, 21, 28n, 29, 68–89, 197 Ahrlé, Ferry 161 Arbeitsmänner als Helfer der Wehrmacht (Koblenz, Bundesarchiv) 162 Ahrlé, René 161 Reichsarbeitsdienst: Wir rüsten Leib und Seele (Koblenz, Bundesarchiv) 163 Albert, Prince von Saxe-Coburg-Gotha 8, 81 Aliens Act (1905) 6, 41 Allan, Maud 74, 76 Anglo-German rivalry 3, 44, 47, 50, 65, 71 Anglo-Saxons 151, 178–9 in British historiography & myth 19, 44, 52, 61–2 hybridity of 45, 49 anti-Semitism 58, 97, 122, 169, 176, 188n Arnim, Elizabeth von 11, 14, 43, 49–50, 58 The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rügen 134–5 The Caravaners 57–8 Elizabeth and her German Garden 49 The Pastor’s Wife 134n The Solitary Summer 49–50, 123 Auden, W.H. 153, 175n, 204 Bad Homburg 94, 96n, 100, 102, 105, 113, 124 Bad Nauheim 14, 89–119, 124 ; see also Germany, spa culture Baden-Baden 94–6, 98n, 100, 113, 116 Baden-Powell, Robert 83, 85; see also Boy Scouts Scouting for Boys 71 Baedeker 95–6, 99–102, 116, 153–4, 165 Bayreuth 122, 132, 146 Beckett, Samuel 158n

Bennett, Arnold 4, 11 The Human Machine 142 Berlin 76, 134n, 164n as ‘big factory’ 74 homosexual subculture 170 Olympic Games (1936) 153–4 Bismarck, Otto von 27, 34n, 38, 138 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 17, 23–4, 30, 35 Blitz, the 15–6, 183–213 Bloch, Iwan, The Sexual Life of our Time 77 Bloomsbury 180, 196 body in consumer culture 95, 110, 121, 126–7, 132–3, 141–2, 146 and electricity 109, 112, 139 in fascist culture 149–181 as grotesque 15, 25–7, 36, 121, 130–132, 146, 158n, 168, 173 as machine 6, 15, 121–5, 136–45, 149 in medical regime 104, 109–16, 124, 126 in physical culture 153, 157 in uniform 170, 173, 176–80; see also Nazi Germany, fascist body image of uniformed Boer War, Second 19, 33, 34, 68, 125–6, 141, 186 Bowen, Elizabeth 183–211 The Death of the Heart 202–3 The Demon Lover 209–10 The Heat of the Day 16, 184–5, 200–2005, 208, 211 Boy Scouts 29, 83–6, 126, 71; see also Baden-Powell, Robert Breker, Arno 161 British Empire adventure fiction 17

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crisis 7, 15, 83, 152–65 corporate identity 18, 20–25, 34, 37, 157, 164, 207 and German ‘influence’ 28–33 gossip 20–25, 38, 74, 189–90, 208 heroic ideal 17–39, 106 ‘imperial archive’ 47, 49, 65, 68–72, 81–3 indirect rule 82 Jeddah scandal 25–6 Merchant Navy 18, 20–27, 34 and militarism 41, 45, 68, 79–87 ‘muscular masculinity’ 65, 84–6, 174 national service 68, 72, 84, 86 and Nazi Germany 16, 151–65, 175, 180–181, 186–7, 197, 201–2 nostalgia for 7, 15, 79–87, 152–65, 180, 187, 206 legitimizing fictions of 2, 14, 17–39, 65–6 physical education 153–4, 157, 164 quest for national efficiency 13, 19, 23, 30, 38, 45, 47, 72, 74, 83, 106–7 reputation 13, 18, 20–28 rivalry with Germany 19, 29, 33, 44, 47, 50, 65, 71 rogue elements in 18, 20–22, 24, 27, 39, 46 and sexuality 9, 44–5, 47, 50, 55, 59–60, 65, 71, 174–5 veldcraft 70–71 Brooke, James 27, 30 Brooke, Rupert 12, 80 Buchan, John 11, 14, 59, 65–6, 70–73, 80 Greenmantle 19, 70–75, 77, 81, 139 Mr Standfast 81 The Thirty-Nine Steps70–72, 81 Carpenter, Edward 5 The Intermediate Sex 76 Chamberlain, Sir Joseph 19, 30–31, 47 Childers, Erskine 10–11, 56, 65–6 The Riddle of the Sands 10, 48, 66n, 69–72 Churchill, Sir Winston 9, 186–8, 201 colonialism, see British Empire; Wilhelmine Germany; Nazi Germany, Lebensraum policy

Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur 79 Conrad, Joseph 17–41 ‘Autocracy and War’ 28n, 33, 34n ‘The End of the Tether’ 18, 32 ‘Falk’ 12, 18, 35–8, 131 on German ‘influence’ 28–33, 45 Heart of Darkness 17, 21, 23, 29–30, 35 Lord Jim 12–13, 17–32, 34–5, 38, 106 Nostromo 33 ‘An Outpost of Progress’ 21, 23–4 The Secret Agent 39, 56, 69, 72–3, 77, 197 Victory 38, 73 corporeality, see body cosmopolitanism 13–14, 41–63, 69, 80, 132 as ‘foreign’ 69, 92, 95, 101, 138 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 98n The Gambler 98–9, 105 Douglas, Lord Alfred 76 The Rossiad 75 Eliot, George 8, 47, 94 Daniel Deronda 94 Eliot, T.S. 12 Ellis, Havelock 5, 76 Studies in the Psychology of Sex 77 Englishness, see also Anglo-Saxons; British Empire; national character amateurism 45, 71–2, 107, 142, 201 blood sports 41–2, 71, 80–83, 107 body 89–149 passim, 169 expressionlessness 105–6 gentleman 18, 20, 26, 29, 58, 80–81, 90, 99, 106–7, 196–7 and heroic ideal 13, 18, 20–34 as ‘incomplete’ 62, 106 landscape 59n, 60, 81, 154 as national spirit 20, 23, 25, 2839 pastoral images of 7, 44, 59, 66, 79–81, 122, 185, 198, 206 sadomasochistic fantasies 74, 151, 170–5 and ‘sexual colonialism’ 174–5 xenophobia 6, 49–50

Index espionage, 43, 68, 71–2, 82, 176–81, 183–211; see also spy fiction eugenics 4, 6, 13, 19, 79, 120–122, 125–6, 142, 154, 164 degeneration 4, 6, 14, 18, 38n, 47, 79, 85, 120, 152, 157, 159 fascism, see Nazi Germany First World War 1, 8, 11, 13–14, 41, 65, 87n, 107, 138, 142, 150, 169, 175, 178, 186 propaganda 6, 11, 14, 16, 38, 65–6, 73–5, 77, 79, 81, 83, 85, 135, 188 xenophobia 55, 130, 135 Ford, Madox Ford, 11, 13–14, 33n, 41­65, 89–120, 124, 134, 139 ; see also Hueffer, Ford Madox on Anglo-Saxons 45–6, 49, 52, 56, 58 on electricity 112 German spa cures 89, 110–112 The Good Soldier 6, 14, 89–120, 124 The Heart of The Country 13 on Holbein’s modernity 89–91 on Prussian Junker 56–8 on psychoanalysis 110–112 Return to Yesterday 89, 110, 112n The Spirit of the People 1, 45, 52, 58, 106, 139 The Soul of London 13, 56–8 When Blood is their Argument 11 Forster, E.M. 5, 7, 10, 13–14, 66, 71, 100, 103, 121, 152 Howards End 41–65, 80, 130 Maurice 174 ‘Notes on the English Character’ 62–3, 106 ‘On Tolenrance’ 189–90 Fougasse (Cyril Kenneth Bird) 189 Careless Talk Costs Lives (London, Imperial War Museum) 192, 194 Franco-Prussian War 47, 103, 107 Freud, Sigmund 5, 27, 37n, 109, 111, 119, 127n, 205 ‘A Child Is Being Beaten’ 172 The Interpretation of Dreams 24 Nachträglichkeit 211 Studies on Hysteria 110 ‘The Uncanny’ 183–5, 201–2

229

German(s), anti-Semitism 58, 97, 158n, 169, 176 appetite 15, 123–5, 131–3 bellicosity 68, 86, 172 in British Monarchy 8, 52, 81 brutality 68–9, 73–4, 77, 169, 175, 178, 197 corpulence 31–2, 36, 92, 123–5, 131 discipline 84–5, 124, 151, 168, 176 domesticity 36 and English food industry 123 grotesqueness 15, 25–7, 38, 121, 128, 131–2, 146, 158n, 168, 197 health consciousness 109, 126, 135 homosexuality 14, 74–6, 169–75 in London 56–7, 123 musicality 11, 51, 124 monstrosity 31, 75, 119–22, 129–30, 132, 189 nineteenth-century image of 10, 26–7, 47 respect for authority 36, 45, 101, 116, 167–8, 197, 197 sadism 74, 174 sentimentality 36, 39, 169, 176 stereotypes & epithets ‘back numbers’ 74 barbarians 46, 66, 74–5, 77–8, 137, 177–9 ‘Beastly Huns’ 65–87, 122, 129, 179, 186 beer drinkers 29–30, 122 ‘criminal butcherbirds’ 189 homosexual 74–5, 170, 174–5 ‘Hunnish erotomania’ 76, 135 ‘Nordic’ types 174, 176 regressive 74 ‘soldiers of modernism’ 149–81 virility 151, 161, 164 vulgarity 80, 180 Germany, see also Nazi Germany; Prussia; Weimar Germany; Wilhelmine Germany efficiency 4, 19, 36, 38, 45, 68, 71, 74, 76, 96, 107, 123, 126, 136–46, 149, 201 engineering 139 gambling 94–5, 98, 116

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Hygiene Exhibitions 142 imperialism 3, 12–13, 18, 22, 27–34, 38–9, 45–48, 57, 65–87, 151, 164–5 ‘influence’ 28–34, 45–7 Junker 14, 43–5, 48–9, 56–8, 82 Kaiser 8, 46, 69, 71, 73 Kultur 12, 77 manufacturing 2–4, 125, 139, 141–4 militarism 19, 27, 36, 57, 66, 86, 107, 137–8, 149, 164 nudism 122, 134–5 physical culture movement 134, 150, 153–4, 157, 173 professional training 37–8, 71–2, 74, 107, 109, 143 progressiveness 3, 48, 51, 77–8, 109, 122–3, 125, 131, 134n, 135, 139, 149, 154–5, 164–5 rationalization 4, 141, 143n regeneration 15, 134, 149–65, 180 sexology 76–7, 120 spa culture 9–105, 109, 111, 113–116 Gibbs, Philip Gosse, Edmund, Inter Arma 79 Great War, see First World War Green, Henry 184, 209 Greene, Graham 11, 15–16, 195 ‘At Home’ 205 ‘The Lieutenant Died Last’ 198–9 The Ministry of Fear 16, 183–211 ‘The News in English’ Haggard, Rider H. 65, 68, 87 King Solomon’s Mines 86 Hamilton, Cicely 153, 165, 197 Heygate, John 166, 169, 176–7 Hitler, Adolf 150, 153, 160, 166, 168, 180, 187–90, 197, 207 Hobson, J.A. 51, 71 Imperialism 47–8, 60, 81 Holbein, Hans the Younger 89–91, 93, 106 Der Kaufmann Georg Gisze (Berlin, Nationalgallerie) 90 Hueffer, Ford Madox 11, 33n Hans Holbein the Younger 89–91 Hunt, Violet 97, 108, 124–5 The Desireable Alien 97, 124–5, 133

immigration 6, 13, 18, 39, 41, 43–4, 49–51, 54, 56, 58, 104, 106, 123; see also Aliens Act (1905) imperialism, see British Empire; Germany, imperialism; Nazi Germany, Lebensraum policy; Wilhemine Germany invasion fiction 14, 65–87, 186, 188n, 198 Isherwood, Christopher 11, 15 on Berlin 170, 173 Christopher and His Kind 173–5 Goodbye to Berlin 151, 173–5, 178–9 Mr Norris Changes Trains 151, 169–73 on British ‘sexual colonialism’ 174–5 James, Henry 10, 43n, 50, 101, 195 The Wings of the Dove 113 Jameson, Frederic 8, 27, 55 Jews 6, 41n, 50, 52n, 54–5, 79–80, 97, 102, 120, 146, 153, 158, 168–9, 178, 204; see also anti-Semitism Joyce, James 2, 10, 119–20 Junker see German(s), Junker Kahn, Fritz 142–5 Der Mensch als Industriepalast (Dortmund, Westfälisches Schulmuseum) 144 Kant, Immanuel 51, 54 Keith, Arthur, The Engines of the Human Body 141 Kipling, Rudyard 7, 65, 71, 75, 87 ‘The Beginnings’ 77, 86 ‘Mary Postgate’ 11, 75 ‘The White Man’s Burden’ 21, 46, 71 Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, Psychopathia Sexualis 76 Lawrence, D.H. 5, 11, 15, 119–45 ‘The Captain’s Doll’ 122, 125 ‘England, My England’ 138 ‘Germans and Latins’ 137, 146–7 Lady Chatterley’s Lover 5, 15, 136, 141, 145, 147, 174, 176 on militarism 86, 136–8 Mr Noon 147 ‘The Prussian Officer’ 74, 136–8, 146 The Rainbow 135, 139, 147

Index ‘The Thorn in the Flesh’ 137 Women in Love 15, 135–47 Le Queux, William 14, 59, 68–9, 87 The Invasion of 1910 68 Spies of the Kaiser 71 Levinas, Emmanuel 187 Lewis, Wyndham 86, 164n Mann, Thomas 103 ‘Deutschland und die Deutschen’ 165 Felix Krull, Confidence Man 97n The Magic Mountain 99 Mansfield, Katherine 6, 123 In a German Pension 103, 133–5 in Wörishofen 134n Masterman, C.F.G. 10, 28 The Condition of England 21, 39, 43, 46–7 Maupassant, Guy de 74 militarism 19, 27, 36, 45, 48, 57, 65–87, 137–8, 149, 164, 179–80, 197; see also British Empire; Nazi Germany; Wilhelmine Germany and sadomasochism modernism, see also modernity; modernization and British Empire 6, 13–14, 17–39 and censorship 5, 24, 77, 85, 119–20, 189, 203 and Englishness 3, 7, 10, 13–14, 17–39, 41–63 epistemological uncertainty 4–6, 108 Jugendstil 2n, 92, 95, 122 Werkbund 15, 143, 146 modernity, see also modernism; modernization 1–15 anxiety about 1, 5, 13–14, 55–6, 65–87, 96, 103, 106, 108, 110, 123, 141, 167, 169 and the city 39, 44–5, 51, 55–9, 69, 105 consumer culture 99, 110, 126–7, 141–2, 146, cosmopolitanism 50–63, 69, 80, 92, 95, 98, 101, 132, 138 deracination 38–9, 53–5, 58 and global economy 2–3, 13, 18, 23, 28, 60–61

231

medical discourses of 5, 76–7, 89–117, 120 as pathology 14, 92, 102–103, 110, 116, 120 pornography 76–7, 119–20 satirized in Punch 41–2, 110 and sexuality 5–6, 14–15, 37, 59–60, 74–7, 80, 93, 97, 105–113, 116–117, 119–120133–7, 146–7, 170–175, 179, 208–9 simulacra 89–93, 106–7, 112, 184 and travel 6, 93, 95, 97–8, 103, 105, 109, 112, 124, 149–81 modernization, 1–3; see also modernism; modernity electricity 1, 109, 112, 139 manufacturing 2–4, 84, 121, 130, 139, 141–3, 145 motor car 4–6, 53, 60, 80, 139, 142 professionalisation 18, 26, 37–8, 71–2, 74, 107, 109, 112, 143 Munro, Hector Hugh see Saki myth 9–10, 16, 122 of the Blitz 16, 183–5, 189 and British Empire 30, 106–7, 211 and D.H. Lawrence 135–6, 146 in Lord Jim 24–5 about national character 14, 44, 52, 61–2, 79, 164 and Nazis 149, 151, 164–5 Prussian 48–9 and war 190, 201, 206, 208–11 national character 2, 13, 16, 18–19, 25–33, 35, 43, 45–63, 65, 72, 79, 81–2, 91, 123, 180, 184, 204; see also British Empire; Englishness; German(s) acculturation 56, 58, 166, 169 assimilation 14, 36, 41–63, 82, 104, 139, 141 and citizenship 50, 83, 126, 157, 204–5, 209 and deracination 38–9, 53–5, 58 as ‘habitus’ 43, 72, 86, 120–121, 123, 134 hybridity of 13–14, 17, 36, 38–9, 43–63, 82, 146, 195 as ‘lack’ 62–3, 106

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English Modernism, National Identity and the Germans, 1890–1950

naturalization 41–3, 57 performativity of 39, 43, 45, 57, 66, 72, 197 phenomenology of 2, 4, 8, 9, 23, 57, 70, 149–50, 154, 164–5 and simulacra 90–93, 106 transculturation 21, 35, 44, 57–8, 60, 72 as ‘race’ 2, 19, 29–30, 38, 46–7, 49, 56–8, 70, 72, 79–80, 122, 153, 168, 198, 200 national identity see national character Nazi Germany and British Empire 151–65, 175, 179–81, 186–8, 197, 201–2 and British tourism 153–6, 158 and British travel writing 149–81 fascist body image, of 150–60, 173, 179 fascist masculinity 150–153, 159–60, 174–5 Labour Corps (Reichsarbeitsdienst) 157–61, 180 Lebensraum policy 164–5 Party Rally (Reichsparteitag) 151, 158–9, 165, 180 Propaganda 155, 158, 160–161, 189 semiotics of 165–9, 177–9 and Thomas Cook’s 154–6, 158, 166–7 army (Wehrmacht) 161, 162, 201 Newbold, Frank 185, 198 Nietzsche, Friedrich 4, 46, 138 Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg) 17 Orwell, George 6, 10, 200, 205–6 Burmese Days 152 Coming Up for Air 154, 178, 203 The Lion and The Unicorn 180, 207 ‘Notes on Nationalism’ 207 palingenesis see Nazi Germany, regeneration popular fiction 11, 14, 55, 65–87, 152 Prussia, -n 12, 14, 27–8, 32, 34n, 43–9, 54, 57–8, 66, 69, 73, 82, 84, 86, 105, 107, 123, 146, 180; see also Germany, Junker Psychoanalysis 76, 109–11, 119

Punch 41–3, 47, 58, 73, 110 race, see British Empire; Englishness; German(s); national character Reich, Wilhelm 179–80 Richardson, Dorothy 11–12 Ritchie, Charles 186–7, 210n Rügen (island of) 134–5, 173, 175n Sackville-West, Vita 170–171 Saki (Hector Hugh Munro) 14, 56, 59, 71 When William Came 14, 79–87, 188n Second World War 9, 16, 183–211 Battle of Britain 199 Blitz 15–6, 183–213 Dunkirk 185, 188, 200–201 ‘temperate masculinity’ 150 propaganda 186–96 Social Darwinism 19, 160, 164, 198 Sontag, Susan, ‘Fascinating Fascism’ 172 spa see Germany, spa culture Spengler, Oswald 136 Man and Technics 139 spy fiction 48, 55–6, 65–87, 151, 176–181, 183–211; see also espionage Stevenson, Robert Louis 21, 24, 37 ‘The Beach at Falesá’ 21 ‘The Ebb Tide’ 21 A Footnote to History 27n, 30 Stevie Smith 15, 176–81, 184, 206 Over the Frontier151, 176–8, 180 Novel on Yellow Paper 176 Stopes, Marie, Married Love 120 Taylorism, see modernization, manufacturing Thackeray, William Makepiece 8, 47, 97 The Newcomes 94 Vanity Fair 93–4 Third Reich, see Nazi Germany Thomas Cook’s 94n, 109, 154–5, 158n, 166–7 Turgenev, Ivan, Smoke 92, 94, 98n Twain, Mark 116 Tramps Abroad 100, 116 Vansittart, Lord 188–9

Index Wagner, Richard 11, 51, 132, 138; see also Bayreuth Wandervogel movement 122, 136–7 Weber, Max 4 ‘National Character and the Junkers’ 51, 57 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism 45 Weimar Germany 15, 143n, 170, 173 Wells, H.G. 4, 6, 56, 121 Tono-Bungay 91–2, 106, 127, 139–40 The War in the Air 83, 188n Wilhelmine Germany 39, 48, 68, 70 Wiesbaden 95, 97n, 98, 100n, 124 Williams, E.E., ‘Made in Germany’ 1–3 Woolf, Leonard 167–7 Woolf, Virginia 4, 6, 15, 113, 184,

233 199–200, 206, 210 in Bayreuth 122, 132–3 in Berlin 170–171 Between the Acts 7 on German women 132, 168n ‘Modern Fiction’ 4, 119, 130 Mrs Dalloway 15, 113, 128–32 in Nazi Germany 167–9 ‘Professions for Women’ 119, 130–131 ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’ 197 Three Guineas 131, 179–80, 197–8, 202 on Wagner operas 132–3, 146 The Voyage Out 103

xenophobia 6, 10, 12, 50, 55, 130, 135