Suzanne Hobson

“Looking all lost towards a Cook's guide for beauty”: the art of literature and the lessons of the guidebook in modernist writing

This article explores the impact of the guidebook, especially the Baedeker series, on modernist literary culture. It argues that the guidebook is a literary phenomenon in its own right and that, as such, it attracts special attention from those engaged in defending and/or extending the category of literature as part of a modernist agenda. In particular, modernist writers are concerned as to whether the guidebook counts as a form of literature and, if so, what this means for the more familiar forms seen in their own essays, fiction and travelogues. What might the invention of the star system to rank scenes and monuments mean for the future of art criticism? How might the guidebook help or hinder the traveller in his/her pursuit of the beautiful or the picturesque? What does recourse to the guidebook reveal about the taste and education of the traveller? And, more pointedly still, what kind and quality of writing is the guidebook itself? This article surveys the extent of modernisms interest in the guidebook, both as a noteworthy new form and as a form modernist writers adapted for use in their own books, before turning in detail to commentary on the guidebook by E.M. Forster, Ernest Hemingway, H.D. and Virginia Woolf. In conclusion, it finds that the guidebook in modernism is very rarely just that. Instead, the guidebook finds unexpected affinities with modernism in its attempt to “modernise” literature – to make it more rational, more totalising and, in the eyes of its critics, less able to discriminate.

Radical Unorthodoxy: Religious and Literary Modernisms in H.D. and Mary Butts

This chapter examines H.D.’s and Mary Butts’s fictions of the ancient world against the background of the modernist crisis in the Catholic and Anglican Churches. The Hellenistic Age is contested ground in this quarrel, claimed by some as the eclipse of the Golden Age of Olympian religion and by others as the dawning of a new epoch of world Christianity. H.D. and Butts follow the example of George Moore and D.H. Lawrence, among others, in providing an account of this age that is also a thinly veiled account of their own times. This chapter asks how they work at the borderlines of orthodoxy and heresy in their stories and how, in particular, they approach the still vexed question of women’s place in Christianity.

‘The Necessary Angel of Earth’: World War II and the Utopian Imagination

This final chapter returns to the question with which I began: how to account in more general terms for sustained modernist interest in angels as revealed in the varied collection of more or less celestial beings surveyed over the previous three chapters. The answer must necessarily be ‘best fit’ because even if it were possible to marshal these angels into a single category the problem would still remain as to how to classify the particular version of modernism to which they belong. Both, however, come into closer focus when seen against a backdrop of debates over the fate of art and belief in a secular age. The very frequency of recourse to the angels in modernist writing suggests that even if modernism can no longer be categorized and set apart as a Godless literature, it remains possible to find common threads running through modernist attitudes to religion. By the same token, these threads go a long way towards explaining the persistence in modernist texts of a figure that might otherwise have been consigned to history as an example of the kind of sentimentalized, decorative and obsolete figure beloved of the Victorians. Modernist angels signal a shared horizon over which it is possible to see arriving and/or disappearing a new age of art and belief in a nominally secular epoch.

Introduction: Twentieth-Century Angelology

This book is about angels and the many and various ways they are represented in modernist literary cultures. A curious assortment, they range from the awe-inspiring (D.H. Lawrence’s ‘winged and staring creatures… quivering their wings across space’1) to the mundane (Wallace Stevens’s ‘necessary angel of earth’2); the messianic (Walter Benjamin’s ‘Angel of History’) to the profane (Djuna Barnes’s ‘angels on all fours… drinking at the water hole of the damned’3); the futuristic (Wyndham Lewis’s science-fiction angels) to the old-fashioned (Virginia Woolf’s Angel in the House4); and the cliched (H.D.’s ‘common-or-garden’ angels5) to the downright bizarre (H.D.’s ‘raspberry shaped ridiculous small angel’6). Modernism is by no means exceptional among historical periods and cultures in offering a plethora of angels for study. But it does provide particular interest as a background against which these angels are brought out in sharp relief. Angels appear regularly in contradistinction both to modernism’s much discussed hostility to traditional religious pieties and its campaign against unnecessary and ornamental figuration in literature. These figures continue to perform significant cultural work even as they are identified as incongruous and untimely: the creation of a previous age of faith or the products of a sentimental Victorian imagination.

‘Angels on All Fours’: The Third Sex and Angels with ‘A Difference’

Sex and gender relations have long been a vexed question for the church. Regressive attitudes to women and sexuality have frequently been cited as a reason for religion’s failure to accommodate to modern needs and priorities even as efforts to bring the two into some kind of dialogue have been made by reformers on both sides of the sacred/secular divide. Marie Stopes, for instance, thought that religious squeamishness about the very language of sexuality required the invention of an entirely new and, she hoped, more palatable code so that adults might not recoil from providing their young with knowledge of sex. In a booklet aimed at parents and teachers, she recommends presenting children with ‘the idea of the erogamic life of the human duity [a variation on deity] as the highest mundane expression of life’.1 Clifford Howard, an American feminist and cousin of H.D.’s, was less inclined to compromise, arguing in his second book on the acrimonious history of sex and religion (1925) that attempts to change outmoded attitudes in the church were futile: ‘Despite the ingenuity of logic and exegesis that the more liberal orthodox churches of today are bringing to bear upon Christian theology, in an effort to accommodate to modern, progressive thought, there remains the outstanding, irreducible fact that it rests upon the assumption of masculine superiority.’2 Howard does not expect modern individuals to do without religion altogether.

‘The Angel Club’: The Angel versus the Ubermensch

Modernist writers had a keen sense of themselves as living in a secular age. Virginia Woolf, for example, diagnosed her era as a ‘lean age’ for literature; a situation exacerbated by the disappearance of common beliefs even as removing the threat of immortality had vastly increased the range of things it was possible to say.1 T.E. Hulme felt the times had been given over to ‘irreligious modern man’ and that art should lead the way in resisting what Andrzej Gasiorek calls ‘hegemonic secular discourses’.2 D.H. Lawrence suggested that human consciousness had re-entered a ‘godless’ era while Wyndham Lewis characterized the twentieth century as a ‘human age’ as distinct from a previous ‘Age of Faith’.3 The modernist version of a secular age is not, however, identical to our own. In its most familiar form, the current version describes how science (often synonymous with nature) has triumphed over religion creating a situation in which it is difficult if not downright impossible for the modern enquiring mind to believe in gods and ministering spirits.4 Taylor argues that the power of this narrative derives from the prestige it enjoys in the academy; such prominence, he suggests, means that the science-driven ‘death of God’ story has come to possess the force of something natural, ‘obvious, compelling, allowing of no cavil or demurral’.5 By contrast, in modernist accounts of secularization, the hegemonic voice of science splinters into a number of other voices - literary, ethical, philosophical and, surprisingly, religious - which by singing from the same hymn- sheet nonetheless manage to suggest that the claims of secularism are ‘obvious, compelling, allowing of no cavil or demurral’.

‘On the Side of the Angels’: Historical Angels and Angels of History

As signature twentieth-century angels, I could find no better candidates than the three examples explored in this chapter: the Angels of Mons, Virginia Woolf’s Angel in the House and Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History. The Angels of Mons are the most widely known of the three; the sighting of a celestial battalion on the battlefield at Mons quickly generated a large body of popular mythology which continued to grow up to the beginning of the twenty-first century. The second and third examples have a particular visibility and importance in the academy. After describing the topic of this book to colleagues, I have typically met with two responses: ‘where are the angels in modernist literature?’ and ‘oh you must have a chapter on Benjamin and/or Woolf’. Interestingly, while examples of twentieth-century angels have been forthcoming, it has proved more difficult to pinpoint a generic description of their kind. These angels are felt, then, to embody a concept - the ‘twentieth- century angel’ - which itself has received little interrogation and, moreover, seems to rest on a still more elusive concept - the ‘historical’ angel. Exactly what, in terms of function and iconography, would distinguish a twentieth-century angel from, say, its thirteenth-century predecessor? Does a ‘historical’ angel intervene in the making of history in the manner of pre-modern angels who were said to direct matters of state and council?1