…
WHY THE ENGLISH HATE SURREALISM
the standards of virtue now prevalent are
incompatible with the production of good poetry
– Bertrand Russell
Britain has spawned several sacred monsters: acknowledged precursors of
Surrealism – from the mysterious, disputed author of The Revenger’s Tragedy to the dream-works of Lewis Carroll (by way
of Swift, Sterne, Blake, Coleridge, the Gothic novel, Emily Bronte, and the
'mirth and marvels' of Tom Ingoldsby) – but – paradoxically, Britain has engendered
very few self-defined Surrealists, in the contemporary sense.
Notwithstanding an indigenous ‘tendency to irrationality’ and a trend of
anarchic fantasy in English art, literature and popular culture (Lottie
‘Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay!’ Collins, Fred Karno's
Army, The Crazy Gang, The Whitehall
Follies, Take it From Here, The
Goons, Carry On films, St
Trinian’s, Screaming Lord Sutch, Basil Brush, Gurney Slade, farcical sex
scandals, Union Jack knickers, Madam Cyn) it is clearly the case that, if transposed
to these shores, a movement such as Surrealism is quickly regarded as ‘foreign’
or out-of-place.
‘You know, it's just not
cricket', says your true-born Englishman in his 'modern rustic' kitchen, his chintzy
drawing room or eco-friendly conservatory somewhere in Middle England.
Victorian critics regarded artists or poets who found inspiration in
Continental trends – like Swinburne, Wilde, Whistler or Beardsley, for example
– as very dubious influences indeed: ‘cuckoos in the nest’ or, even, a dire
threat to the moral order. This stance was exemplified by Robert Buchanan in
his polemical pamphlet The Fleshly School of Poetry and Other Phenomena
of the Day (1872) where, in the course of a vitriolic attack on Baudelaire,
he refers to Paris as 'the most debauched city of the world'.
Like Baudelaire and the Cancan, Surrealism was always going to be seen
as just another ‘un-British’ import perhaps reluctantly tolerated but actually seen
as a sinister aberration. Most would prefer to deport it back to the sin cities
of Europe, where such louche, ‘decadent’ or subversive japes rightfully belong
– although all classes often displayed an ambivalent, even prurient, attraction
to Le Cancan, ‘Gay Paree’ and bawdy European
‘naughtiness’ in general. Hence the popularity of Variety Show or Music Hall
acts like the Tiller Girls (originally named Les Jolies Petites), or the Colonna
Troupe of Amelia Newham from St John’s Wood (aka Mlle Colonna) whose
high-kicking performances at The Alhambra, Leicester Square, could be relied
upon to attract the attention of militant campaigners from the National
Vigilance Association.
Likewise, when exhibited at the Grafton Gallery in London in 1893,
Degas’ painting In the Café (L’Absinthe)
(1875) was found to be a morally repulsive example of the flippant and vulgar
artistic ideals of ‘new painters’, sparking a lengthy controversy in the Westminster Gazette; the same picture
was loudly hissed by disgusted bidders when put up for auction at Christie’s.
Numerous other examples could be mentioned. All of which tends to corroborate
the opinion of Bertrand Russell when he said moral indignation ‘is one of the
most harmful forces in the modern world’.
One thinks of the 'mad Frenchmen' gently parodied by Arthur Machen
through the character of the worried father in his semi-autobiographical
novel The Hill of Dreams (1907): 'The parson began to fear
that his son was like some of those mad Frenchmen of whom he had read, young
fellows who had a sort of fury of literature, and gave their whole lives to it,
spending days over a page, and years over a book, pursuing art as Englishmen
pursue money...'. Indeed, a regressive and venal Victorianism is still the
dominant attitude today in most respectable circles which, even in the
twenty-first century, remain resolutely insular in a supercilious,
fog-in-the-Channel kind of way. One thinks of that moment in Through the Looking-Glass (1871) when
passengers in a railway carriage utter a telepathic chorus of thoughts for Alice’s
benefit. “Better say nothing at all. Language is worth a thousand pounds a
word!”
In an essay on ‘The Visual Poetics of British Surrealism’ (1996), Michel
Remy (‘that most unlikely creature, a French enthusiast for
English Surrealism’ to quote George Melly) probed this terrain and explained how
the initial progress of Surrealism in England was impeded by an existing,
well-established counter-movement defined as the ‘Bloomsbury Spirit’ and exemplified
by the theories of Roger Fry and Clive Bell. The dominant character of
‘Bloomsburyism’ (and its subsequent ramifications in the work of Ben Nicholson
and Duncan Grant, among others), emphasised the ‘visual centrality’ of clearly
delineated conceptions of order, structure, integration and unification. This aesthetic
was developed into a doctrine of ‘pure art’ characterised by a militant
‘exclusion of representation’, the pursuit of a metaphysical, ‘spiritual’,
ideal of hyper-abstraction; a kind of ethereal, visual music. This viewpoint
was later reinforced by other writers, such as critic Clement Greenberg, who – promoting
Abstract Expressionism as the epitome of ‘superior culture’ and a counterforce
against both Socialist Realism and commercial (capitalist) Kitsch – took a
similar approach in the late 1930s. And, of course, the toleration of art only
if it has a ‘spiritual purpose’ (i.e. devotional parables, theological
propaganda or cautionary tales and righteous fables of renunciation and
self-denial) is a typical Puritan strategy. Ideally – like Plato, the Church
Fathers and the Iconoclasts– the out-and-out Puritan would banish idolatrous ‘graven
images’ (art is idolatry) altogether, but social-cultural pressures are such that a
‘spiritual’ aesthetic of ‘pure art’ provides an expedient, opportunistic alternative
to outright abolition. However, to cite Russell again, this ‘generally means
that it is bad art.’
As recently as 1978, in ‘Alchemy of the Word’, an article on Surrealism for Harpers
and Queen, novelist Angela Carter stated bluntly ‘the movement never
travelled across the Channel, not even in the Thirties…’ The Dadas are more
fashionable now she said, and claimed explicitly that:
‘Surrealist romanticism is at the opposite pole from classical
modernism, but then, the Surrealists would never have given Pound or Eliot
house room on strictly moral grounds. A Mussolini fan? A high Tory? They’d have
moved noisily, but with dignity, to another café’
Consolidated just after the First World War, the stranglehold of
moralistic Victorianism (‘The Bloomsbury Spirit’ in the visual arts,
Anglo-American Classical Modernism, in the literary sphere) was/is almost
total. Despite the limited success of the famous 1936 London exhibition at the
New Burlington Galleries, where Sheila Legge performed in an event entitled The Phantom of Sex Appeal, Surrealists
will always be Outsiders, relegated to the cultural margins – perhaps no bad
thing, it might be said.
A Surrealist Declaration of 1947 offered a diagnosis of
the English anti-Surrealist ‘paradox’. Aside from immediate factional issues
the Declaration identified wider concerns. These included the
need to combat reactionary, jingoistic conformist attitudes and ‘diehard
militarism’, which may be typical of other (apparently) democratic European
societies. Scorning the notion that Surrealist revolt may be dismissed as a
‘sin of youth’ the authors identified the ‘decentralised structure of English
society’ as a major problem and, further, highlighted an all-pervasive ‘moral
pressure’ from Protestant Christianity as the real enemy. ‘An enemy which
attacks Man from the inside… an enemy which is itself infinitely divided and
superficially liberal.’
Here, Remy’s analysis of mainstream English abstractionists advancing a
‘teleological’ agenda, inherently reactionary and anti-Surreal in its concern
with the moral-spiritual function of art, is telling. He detects a specifically
English tendency at work. A ‘disembodied functioning of the spirit’, the legacy
of Plato and Aristotle, an exclusive formalism, an ‘optical totalitarianism’,
the ‘subordination of the emotion’, a puritanical mode of ‘aesthetic Quakerism’.
This arises from the innate tendency of the English (in
particular) to regard themselves as ‘more radical than the radicals’. Our Anglo-Saxons
suffer from a deep conviction that ‘true’ radicalism is embodied in a
home-grown tradition of religious non-conformity. This tendency is a political
ethos; a pervasive subculture of anti-establishment, reformist dissent that dates
back to the Civil War era, or, even earlier, to the Peasant’s Revolt. George
Orwell, in his essay 'The Prevention of Literature' (1946) is among those who
have defined the basis of English radicalism as the tradition of Milton's Areopagitica and
Dissenter Protestantism, quoting a Revivalist hymn ('Dare to be Daniel...') to
sum up his notion of the 'heretic' or ‘dissenter’ who 'refused to outrage his
own conscience'.
It is undeniable that this heroic-dissident, semi-Calvinist tendency –
derived from a Biblical 'we-are-all-sinners' mode of ersatz egalitarianism, is
central to an indigenous, iconoclastic cultural formation, closer to Methodism
than to Marx, owing allegiance to Geneva rather than to Rome. It is obviously hostile
to pure or absolute Surrealism.
For, while the objectives of Surrealism may include, ‘the total
liberation of the mind and of all that it
resembles’ (Declaration of 27
January, 1925), or ‘the infinite expansion of reality’ (Balakian), or a return
to ‘the sources of poetic imagination’ (Breton), it is also necessary to bear
in mind that, as a doctrine of ‘absolute non-conformism’ (notre non-conformisme absolu), ‘total revolt’ or ‘complete
insubordination’, Surrealism ('this tiny footbridge over the abyss' - Breton again) maintained
an implacable stance of opposition to the ideology of family-country-religion,
a complex seen as an apparatus of social conservatism, or as a ‘mechanism of
oppression’; in fact the Three Fs of ‘traditional’ or ‘cornerstone’ conservatism:
Faith, Flag and Family.
Furthermore, it is necessary to recognise that Surrealism was not some
form of mysticism, or spiritual ‘heresy’ but, as Maurice Nadeau has said, is a
state of mind understood as a tendency ‘not
to transcend but to penetrate reality’.
It is still the case that, even in these wacky, Post-PoMo times,
self-styled ‘innovative’ poets from these damp and misty isles are obsessed by
language in a completely useless manner (academic-philosophical cult of
Wittgenstein); they flirt with fake notions of ‘radical’ avant garde modernism
and, furthermore, are crippled by a form of ‘ethical’ neo-Puritanism known as
‘political correctness’, or, more rarely, its mirror image; a cult of inverted
virtue signalling, known nowadays as Anti-Woke. They may often affect a
‘progressive’ worldview, incorporating derivative, tokenistic,
anti-establishment attitudes mixed up with pacifism and anti-capitalism into
what is, in effect, a reactionary, conformist sweetness-and-light agenda that
consciously or not works in collusion with fundamentalists and reactionaries everywhere.
Just as the hippie was an inverted
bourgeois, so todays ‘radical’ is an inverted conservative – an inverted
conservative camouflaged by inverted snobbery. This posture is justified by
notions of ‘respect’, distorted by the Cultural Cringe, filtered through State Multiculturalism
and energised by lip-service to no-nonsense Working Class Heroes, the
North-South Divide and Family Values: a classic example of ‘repressive
tolerance’ to use a phrase borrowed from Herbert Marcuse, or 'trahsion
des clercs', as our French friends would say.
In his pivotal text An
Essay on Liberation (1969) Herbert Marcuse provided an incisive
outline of the radical 'new sensibility' which, in pursuit of a primal form of
freedom as biological necessity, must pass 'from Marx to Fourier... from
realism to Surrealism'. In the aesthetic realm, Marcuse hailed the emergence of
'desublimated "lower" and destructive forms... mixing the barricade and the dance floor.'
This 'new sensibility', he claimed, was not only opposed to the traditional
'establishment' but also attacked the deadly esprit de serieux of
the socialist camp: 'miniskirts against the apparatchiks, rock 'n'
roll against Soviet Realism'. Perhaps this new, hedonistic, ‘permissive’
idolatrous, unholy zeitgeist, from
Desmond Morris’s ICA exhibition Paintings
by Chimpanzees (1957) to Kenneth Tynan’s ‘nudest show on Earth’, Oh! Calcutta! (Off Broadway, 1969, The
Roundhouse, 1970) marked the final end of Victorianism and of the Bloomsbury
Spirit. For a brief moment it looked as though Surrealism had finally found a
home or some acceptance at least.
Yet the force of this argument is
somewhat diminished in the light of social facts underlying the so-called
Permissive Society of the ‘Sixties, the ‘rebellious’ cultural backdrop to
Marcuse’s text (which was as popular in the UK as it was in the USA).
To quote rock critic Robert Christgau: 'There was a sense of rebelliousness...
but one of the ways it was rebellious was it wanted to enjoy having more
pleasure than it was told it could have. This was much more important than the
political element, numerically speaking.' These remarks apply to the US but the
same principle applies to Britain, where hedonistic impulses were boosted by
the affluence of 'You've Never Had It So Good' consumer boom affluence, greater
social mobility, the availability of The Pill and the abolition of National
Service. By 1967 this new hedonism had become a fully-fledged, jet-set,
high-life of conspicuous consumption, as exemplified by the popular advertising
slogan 'When you got it – flaunt it!'
Alan Parker later remarked: 'Images of Ursula Andress coming out of the water
in Dr No were more appealing than a monk self-immolating in
Saigon'. Or as Andrew Loog Oldham succinctly put it: 'I didn't have any goals;
it was all just a lark'.
Obviously this 'surprise-wave' New
Sensibility ‘Youthquake’ had little in common with any native British notion of
alleged 'radicalism'; a tendency which cannot escape either its ascetic origin
or the historical legacy of assorted puritanical Lollards, Diggers, Ranters,
Levellers and troublesome, lefty clerics in the tradition of John Ball, 'the
mad priest of Kent'. Although much diluted, this is a tradition still with us
as exemplified by the ‘Anglican Priest and polemicist’ Giles ‘Loose Canon’
Fraser, whose radicalism means little more than attacking the superior
attitudes of ‘metropolitan liberals in the media’.
The New Sensibility was a cultural shift that helps to account
for a wider resurgence of interest in Surrealism that surfaced in the ‘Sixties
and early ‘Seventies.
In 1969, the University of Michigan published the Seaver & Lane
first full length English translation of Andre Breton's Surrealist
Manifestoes, (based on the definitive French edition of 1962) followed by
the key anthology, Surrealists on Art (1970) from Prentice
Hall, edited by activist and critic Lucy R. Lippard. Earlier translations from
US sources included Breton’s 1924 semi-autobiographical quasi-novel Nadja (1960) and Maurice Nadeau’s 1964
overview The History of Surrealism
(1965) both translated by Richard Howard.
In Britain at that time one might note a Surrealist influence (via Antonin
Artaud) on experimental theatre, in, for example, the work of Lindsay Kemp with
productions such as Flowers (1966), Salome (1974) and Cruel Garden (1977) that exemplified his unique dramatic style based
on myth, ritual and trance states (‘we balance on a knife edge between the
serious and the ridiculous’), radical feminist director and poet Jane Arden, Peter
Brook and Charles Marowitz. It was Brook and Marowitz who staged a Theatre of
Cruelty Season with the RSC Experimental Theatre Group at LAMDA in Jan-Feb 1964
while Brook directed the Marat/Sade by
Peter Weiss at the Aldwych Theatre in August of the same year. Marowitz was the
author the play Artaud at Rodez, and
founded the Open Space Theatre (with Thelma Holt) in 1968.
It was J. G. Ballard who, in the ‘New Wave’ SF magazine New Worlds observed that ‘the images of
Surrealism are the iconography of inner space’ (‘The Coming of the Unconscious’,
New Worlds, July 1966) pointing to a
general diffusion of Surrealism into wider popular culture. The term ‘surreal’
in various interpretations could be applied to social phenomena such as: the
‘underground scene’; to New Left politics and the Mass Media; to the ‘creative
revolution’ of advertising and fashion, viewed through the lens of Pop Art, or
to ‘cult’ TV shows like The Avengers (1961-1969) masterminded with inimitable panache for ABC
Television by producer/story editor Brian Clemens. Discussing the Visual Pop
design of record sleeves George Melly in his Revolt into Style: The Pop Arts 1966-1970 noted that ‘Surrealism
has remained the most pervasive influence’.
Indeed it is tempting to see in the 1966 appointment of zoologist, socio-biologist
and Surrealist , Desmond Morris, author of The
Biology of Art (‘the picture-making behaviour of the Great Apes’) (1962) and
controversial best-seller The Naked Ape
(1967) , as director of the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts), a telling
sign of the times. Significantly the ICA had been founded by English
surrealists Roland Penrose and Herbert Read (among others) in an Oxford Street
cinema basement in 1947. Then, the City of Exeter hosted an influential
exhibition The Enchanted Domain at
the Exeter City Gallery in 1967 organised by John Lyle with the participation
of various significant personalities including Penrose, ELT Mesens, George
Melly, Conroy Maddox and Robert Benayoun among others.
Here one might also mention novels by Angela
Carter such as Heroes and Villains (1969), The Infernal Desire
Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972) or The Passion of New Eve (1977). Doctor
Hoffman was known in the US as The War of Dreams a title that evokes
Carter’s particular style of scary surreality – a psychic locale from where we
embark on ‘a desperate expedition to a destination at the heart of the dark in
a nameless zone, where we would find the key to an unimaginable secret.’
Although a purist approach may regard many such tendencies especially
those in the advertising and the mass media, as symptomatic of a general
dilution and commodification not to be welcomed. It may, on the other hand,
seem that the Surrealist spirit, in tune with the New Sensibility of counter-cultural
desublimation (symbolised for many in post-imperial Britain by the Profumo
scandal), did indeed have the last laugh; gleefully cocking a snook at the
strictures of aesthetic Quakerism; giving Mrs Grundy, malcontents of
post-imperial humiliation (Peregrine Worsthorne), The Festival of Light and
high-minded Leavisite critics from the ‘grammar school ethos’, a run for their
money. At least it looked that way for a short while – before the Sixties
spirit of ‘anarcho-libertarianism’ (Durgnat, see below), with its ‘swinging’
lifestyle, its subversive art schools and electroluminescent dresses, its 'kinky'
PVC boots and jet-age flight attendants in shocking miniskirts, softly and
suddenly vanished away during the wasted years of the Thatcher era.
The Turin exhibition, Le Muse Inquietanti (The
Disquieting Muses, 1967-1968), organised by Luigi Carluccio, was
covered by English mainstream art magazines such as Studio International and Art
& Artists and there was considerable interest in the work of Max
Ernst, who was the subject of a large illustrated book by John Russell
published in 1968 (The spirit of Ernst haunts Annabel, the central character in
Angela Carter's surrealist 'collage novel' Love, 1971). That same
year the BBC Third Programme broadcast a feature-length tribute to Andre
Breton, A Link Between The Worlds (20 March 1968), compiled by
Barbara Bray, produced by Douglas Cleverdon .This programme included contributions
from David Gascoyne, Jacques B Brunius, Philippe Soupault, S W Hayter and
Eugene Ionesco among others, as well as a bizarre radiophonic-dramatic piece by
Fernando Arrabal.
Also in 1968, Methuen published the Absurdist, proto-Surrealist Ubu
Plays of Alfred Jarry, jointly translated by Cyril Connolly and Simon
Watson Taylor (who had previously translated Marcel Jean’s The History
of Surrealist Painting, 1960), while Jonathan Cape published The
Selected Works of Alfred Jarry (edited and translated by Simon Watson
Taylor with Roger Shattuck) in 1969. The
then head of BBC Radio Drama, Martin Esslin, had published The Theatre of The Absurd in 1962. This landmark study assimilated
Surrealism into a broader panorama of Absurdist heritage (‘an inscape of the
mind’) stretching back over a thousand years or more. The BBC had also broadcast
Esslin’s adaptation of the Ubu Plays between
1965 and 1968. Along with Beardsley and Mucha, Jarry was subject to something
of a revival, in fact George Melly said about The Goons ‘They are our effective
surrealists, our democratic Pere Ubus, our sacred monsters’.
In 1970 Lykiard's acclaimed translation of Les Chants de
Maldoror was published, while in the following year, 1971, Simon
Watson Taylor’s translation of Aragon’s Paris Peasant, a key
surrealist text, also appeared. This was followed by the Harper & Row
edition of Surrealism and Painting, a
compilation of Andre Breton’s writing on visual art which included not only the
titular essay but numerous uncollected pieces culled from pamphlets and
catalogues. Covering the period 1928 to 1965 this extensive survey (translation
by Watson Taylor, again) amounted to ‘not so much a reissue as an original
event’ according to an introductory note.
For the generation growing up in the 1960s and interested in film, a key
semi-Surrealist influence was the prolific and contrarian critic Raymond
Durgnat, chairman of the London Film-maker’s Co-op and advocate of ‘underground
cinema’. ‘Fiercely anti-puritan and anti-censorship’ (Rayns), Durgnat was a
regular contributor to Films & Filming, and also to the
no-frills Motion magazine which emerged from the radical LSE
student culture of 1961.
Durgnat contributed to Motion from 1962 and was
responsible for the scandalous ‘Companion to Violence and Sadism in the Cinema’
and the anti-establishment polemic ‘Standing Up For Jesus’ (Motion No
6 Autumn 1963) which attacked both the highbrow literary sweetness-and-light
critics of the Oxbridge conservative consensus (i.e. Sight & Sound)
but also the chic poseurs of what was known as the Free Cinema movement. In
April 1963, the ‘watershed year’ of the Summer of Scandal, Durgnat presided
over an ICA event on violent cinema called ‘The Art of Scaring You to Death’
based on his Motion ‘Companion’, itself partly inspired
by The Romantic Agony by Mario Praz, a key source of
transgressive, proto-Surrealist ideas.
Approaching film from a basically Surrealist-Freudian viewpoint (‘images
of the mind’), Durgnat held that ‘photography was not essentially realistic,
and film not essentially photographic’ (Miller). He watched movies for their
‘poetic’ qualities. He advocated a poetry with ‘no intellectual protocol’; a
poetry derived from ‘obvious’ symbols. It was a poetic dimension of the mass
media and the commercial cinema; an erotic force, energising popular
entertainment at a subliminal level. This obvious symbolism (of carnivals,
derelict houses, fairgrounds, mechanical music and mirrors, extended to include
railway stations, shop windows, statues, tape-recorders and underwater spaces…)
maintained atavistic links to primal myths and fables, links that highbrow
critics tend to ignore. In ‘The Angel of Poetry Hovering’ section of
his book Films and Feelings (1967) Durgnat wrote how the ‘mute
poetry’ of the mainstream blends ‘fact, drama, the ‘Surreal’, dream, magic, and
the supernatural powers at their play.’ This ‘oneiric’ definition of
popular entertainment and middle-of-the-road cinema is a classic Surrealist
position, exemplified by directors like Franju, Bunuel and Jean Rollin,
presided over by sexy screen goddesses like Barbarella, Mrs Emma Peel, Modesty
Blaise or Lavinia the Black Witch of Greymarsh – as played in Curse of
the Crimson Altar (1968) by ‘Scream Queen’ Barbara Steele, resplendent
in green make-up.
Wider interest in Surrealism in Britain in the Sixties was further
stimulated by independent publishers such as Calder & Boyars.
The Calder & Boyars ‘French Surrealism’ series included works by
Breton (Nadja and Arcane 17), Picasso (Desire Caught
by The Tail), Aragon (The Libertine), Arp (Collected French
Writings) and Tristan Tzara’s Seven Dada Manifestos (translated
by Barbara Wright) and in the eighties the Selected Poems of
Paul Eluard. The Calder imprint remained for many years a catalytic force,
publishing related authors like Burroughs, Beckett (veteran translator of
Surrealist poets), Borges, Raymond Roussel, Fernando Arrabal, Georges Bataille
(Eroticism, 1962, Literature And Evil, 1973) and Roger
Vitrac. The diffusion of these texts in English translation – often for the
first time – contributed to a climate in which Surrealism extended its appeal
well beyond the sphere of literary and artistic cliques. That Calder regarded
his publishing activities as conflicting with endemic anti-Surreal tendencies
is evident from his criticism of British indifference to art history, hostility
to both intellectual analysis and to any ‘investigation of the creative process.’
As explained in his ‘Introduction’ to A William Burroughs Reader (1982),
he lays the blame squarely on British ‘insularity’ and the ‘pioneer Puritanism
of the American psyche’, a stance basically the same as that of the Declaration of
1947 – and of Michel Remy in his 1996 essay.
The later history of Surrealism in the UK is limited to the vestigial
activities of major figures from the early period and the Melmoth Group of
1979, which disbanded in 1981. One might make reference to the magazine Manticore/Surrealist
Communication (1997-2006) published by the Leeds Surrealist Group
founded with international links in 1994. He refers to various forms of
‘occultation’ maintaining a Surrealist presence at a subterranean cultural
level, sharing a new spirit of gamesmanship infused with a semi-Situationist,
semi-occult psycho-geography. This latter theme is also explored by the poet
and novelist Iain Sinclair including his more recent work such as London
Orbital: A Walk Round the M25 (2002).
In truth, the so-called ‘Permissive Society’, both here and elsewhere,
was a minor skirmish in a wider culture war, a skirmish which has since passed into
nostalgic obscurity. It was destined to become a faded, but hideous memory of ‘mass
national debauch, the breakdown of all known moral standards, the collapse of
Western civilization’, a sentiment attributed to Beverley Nichols when reporting
on The Twist craze of 1962.
Looking back a decade or so later Christopher Booker echoed these
sentiments, describing the ‘Swinging Sixties’ as a case of ‘general world-wide
hysteria’.
Booker, a Christian convert and Thatcherite, saw the decade as an
egregious example of the Golden Calf Syndrome; a nightmare time when ‘the
rebellion of the early Romantics reached its peak’; when ‘the children of the
Sixties sought to shake, deafen, blind and drug themselves into the ‘ultimate
experience’ on a scale never before seen – until there was almost nowhere
further to go.’ Of course, Mrs
Whitehouse, Mrs Grundy and the mainstream moralists were victorious in this
struggle for moral rectitude. Stigmatised by Tory politicians and their
disciples in the media as ‘a time when it all went wrong’, the Sixties and the national
debauch of the permissive New Hedonism, soon dwindled into the distance, fast
fading in the rear-view mirror or mythologised as a cautionary tale, while
Surrealism was seen as just another irresponsible fad.
Speaking for 'serious minded readers' in his Introduction (1979)
to The Oxford Book of Contemporary Verse 1945-1980, D J Enright
exemplified mainstream attitudes when he parenthetically dismissed any interest
in Surrealism as a 'regressive' mode of 'internationalism', one of those tendencies
'which reached their modest apex several decades ago'. Enright held the view
that ‘internationalism’ was just one of the fads and fancies of contemporary
poetry, among which he includes 'free' fantasy, aesthetic narcissism,
'difficult' verse, formalism, Noble Savagery, Concrete Poetry,
'Doing-Your-Own-Thing', Violent Verse, Protest Poetry, the 'Struggle With
Words' (language) schools and Confessionalism. He described the latter as 'one
of the saddest epidemics of recent years'.
For Enright all of these sad poetic fads were consolatory activities
arising from either the eclipse of faith or from trendy education. They represented
the antithesis of his anti-surreal ideal; 'the poetry of civility, passion and
order'. This sort of 'no-nonsense' talk passes for hard-nosed, trenchant
criticism in certain circles, even today. But then – deep down – the English
hate Surrealism.
Select Bibliography
Balakian, Anna, Surrealism: Road to the Absolute, Dutton, 1970.
Ballard, J G, A User’s Guide to the Millennium, Flamingo, 1997.
Barthes, Roland, The Language of Fashion, Berg, 2006.
Beer, Gillian, Alice in Space. The Sideways Victorian World of Lewis
Carroll, University of Chicago, 2018
Booker, Christopher, The Seventies. Portrait of a Decade, Penguin Books,
1980
Breton, Andre, Manifestoes of Surrealism, University of Michigan, 2007.
Breton, Andre, Surrealism and Painting, Harper & Row, 1972
Buchanan, Robert, The Fleshly School of Poetry, Strahan & Co, 1872.
Calder, John (ed.), A William Burroughs Reader, Picador, 1982.
Carroll, Lewis, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass,
Wordsworth Editions, 1993
Carter, Angela, Expletives Deleted: Selected Writings, Vintage, 1993.
Carter, Angela, The Passion of New Eve, Virago Press. 1982.
Clayton, Antony, Decadent London: Fin de Siecle City, Historical
Publications, 2005
Cohn, Nick, Awopbobaloobop Alopbamboom, Pimlico/Vintage, 2004
Durgnat, Raymond, Films and Feelings, MIT Press, 1971.
Enright, D J (ed.) The Oxford Book of Contemporary Verse 1945-1980, OUP,
1980.
Fiddy, Dick, Brian Clemens, Auteur of The Avengers, BFI South Bank
Guide, Jul 2010.
Fraser, Giles, Religious Belief Isn’t Boring, Radio Times 27 Jan-2 Feb
2018.
Innes, Christopher, Avant Garde Theatre 1892-1992, Routledge, 1993.
Levy, Silvano (ed.) Surrealism: Surrealist Visuality, Keele University,
1997.
Machen, Arthur, The Hill of Dreams, Corgi Books, 1967.
Marcuse, Herbert, An Essay On Liberation, Beacon Press, 1969.
Melly, George, Revolt Into Style The Pop Arts 1966-1970, Faber &
Faber, 2008.
Melly, George, Don’t Tell Sybil, Atlas Press, 2013.
Miller, Henry K, Poetry in Motion, Sight & Sound, Sept 2014.
Morgan, Robin & Leve, Ariel, 1963: The Year of the Revolution, Dey
Street, 2014.
Nadeau, Maurice, The History of Surrealism, Penguin Books, 1973
Orwell, George, Essays, Penguin Books, 2000.
Pavitt, Jane, Fear and Fashion in the Cold War, V&A Publishing,
2008.
Rayns, Tony, Adventures in the Screen Trade, Sight & Sound, Dec
2014.
Remy, Michel, Surrealism in Britain, Ashgate/Lund Humphries, 1999.
Remy, Michel (ed.), On the Thirteenth Stroke Of Midnight, Carcanet
Press, 2013.
Robins, Anna Gruetzner/Thomson, Richard, Degas, Sickert &
Toulouse-Lautrec. London and Paris 1870-1910. Tate Publishing, 2005
Russell, Bertrand, Sceptical Essays, Routledge, 2004.
Sage, Lorna, Angela Carter, Northcote House, 1994.
Sage, Lorna (ed.), Flesh and the Mirror. Essays on the Art of Angela
Carter, Virago Press, 2007.
Waldberg, Patrick, Surrealism (The Paths of Surrealism), Thames & Hudson,
1965.
Worsthorne, Peregrine,
Price of Profumo: Tories Smeared, Life Magazine, 21 June, 1963.
illus: Nothing is Sacred, 1976
