Lauren Arrington

The blindness of hindsight: Irish and British poets look back on early fascist Italy*

ABSTRACT In the interwar period, the small town of Rapallo, Italy, was the year-round home of Ezra and Dorothy Pound and a seasonal retreat for W. B. Yeats and George Yeats. The promise of good company, the hope of good weather, and the potential for poetic collaboration drew to Rapallo a number of poets who were influential in shaping twentieth-century poetry. However, Pound’s virulent fascism and the Pact of Friendship and Alliance between Germany and Italy (1939) meant that writers were loathe to recognise the degree to which Rapallo was instrumental to late modernist networks. For the most part, biographers have followed suit. This essay attends to memoirs written by Nancy Cunard, H. D., Richard Aldington, and Thomas MacGreevy to illustrate post-war aversions to acknowledging the importance of Rapallo and to demonstrate how writers negotiated their relationship to Pound in constructing their own literary biographies in the shadow of the Second World War.

The Fabian Society

Amidst the squalor of nineteenth-century London, a small group of middle-class intellectuals set about the reconstruction of civilisation. The Fabian Society was far from the only organism to arise from the grime, but unlike some of their revolutionary contemporaries, Fabians were, on the whole, not very interested in getting dirty themselves. Indeed, many were adverse to physical discomfort beyond the hair shirt of their Jaeger woolen suits and the strictures of a vegetarian diet. Bernard Shaw was one such woollener, and with his predilection for cold porridge and his training as a clerk, he was at home amongst the utopians and civil servants who were, in the words of May Morris, ‘gruesomely respectable’. Fabianism was a set of principles: never a creed and never an ideology, with little policy beyond the societys commitment to gradualism. Fabians sought the practical application of their ideas. Theory was important insofar as it facilitated the transfer of society to socialism, but the Fabians believed that this process was bound to be slow. Fabianism was not revolutionary. The society began amongst a small group of spiritualists and ghost-watchers who, according to their first secretary, Edward Pease, were interested in ‘social as well as psychical progress’. In 1883, the Scottish intellectual Thomas Davidson gave a lecture in London on ‘The New Life’ in which he set out Tolstoyan ideas on clean living. The Fellowship of the New Life, inspired by Davidsons lecture, embraced a communistic vision dedicated to ‘the higher life’ and to providing ‘a worthy education for the young’. Some members, including Edward Pease, envisioned a more practical undertaking than the ‘subordination of material things to the spiritual’, and so Fabianism was slowly born. The cause of that birth was supplanted by an origin myth brandished on the title page of the first Fabian tract, the reading of which brought Shaw into the Fabian fold. Why are the Many Poor? proclaimed: ‘For the right moment you must wait, as Fabius did most patiently, when warring against Hannibal, though many censured his delays; but when the time comes you must strike hard, as Fabius did, or your waiting will be in vain, and fruitless’. For the Fabians, the moment to strike was perpetually in the future.

Theatre of Dissent: the Historical Imagination of the Irish Workers’ Dramatic Company

While the dominant theatre of the Irish Literary Revival relied on ahistorical mythologies to imagine a unified (and arguably Unionized) nation, the Irish Workers’ Dramatic Company was intent on a drama of disruption.1 Based at Liberty Hall, the headquarters of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, and concerned with the material welfare of the working classes, the amateur company presents an alternative to the preoccupations of the Abbey Theatre with its mystical depictions of an uncorrupted west, representations of an imaginary peasantry and its concern with nationality. Whereas the aim of Yeats and Gregory was to represent the nation in plays dealing with Irish legend or ‘Irish historic personages or events’, the Irish Workers’ Dramatic Company aimed to intervene in the present moment, to reimagine the place of the individual in history and in the process to effect material change.2

History and politics

If Hegels famous definition, Weltseele zu Pfer? de, can be applied without fear of hyperbole to a historical figure, it can surely be applied to Alexander the Great. True, the German philoso? pher coined this epithet for Napoleon, whom he had glimpsed on horseback after the battle of Jena, and indeed it also fits the empereur, too, for without his actions, and the reactions they caused, modern Europe is inconceivable. In the same way the Hellenistic oikumene and its offshoots, the universality of the Roman Empire and Christianity, are in the end inconceivable without Alexanders revolutionary impact in many fields. It was a revolution ? as momentous for subsequent life and thought as the discovery of America and the demonstration that our universe is not geocentric... ? (Moses Hadas). The fact is that few exceptional personalities belonging to mankinds past have aroused such enthusiasm in biographers and historians as Alexan? der, the son of another figure of historical stature, Philip of Macedon. Witness the famous Einleitung, having all the character of a fervent hymn, that precedes the Geschichte Alexanders des Grossen by J.G. Droysen (1835), a book which, though superseded in many of its details, still stands out as a memorable historical exposition and above all a work of art, overshadowing many subsequent monographs which appear feeble and often pedantic in comparison. This is true, for instance, if only partially so, of the picture of this age and leader drawn by K.J. Beloch (Griechische Geschichte, 2nd ed., vols. III and IV, 1922-1927). According to this author, Alexander was neither a great statesman nor a great strategist, for it is argued that the bulk of his political successes are to be attributed to his father, Philip, and that his three decisive victories over the Persians are really due to the strategical genius of Parmenion. Yet despite these evident prejudices, stemming from a rationalistic ? professorial? aversion to that brilliance that transcends all ?normal? human standards, we are indebted to Belochs sober criticism for having clarified many details. Above all, he placed the incisive historical role of Philip, heralding the achievements of his son and heir, in true perspective, and pointed to the essential part the above-mentioned Macedonian general had in the military feats of the young king during the first half of his rule.