Why I'm afraid of Virginia Woolf: Eugenics and modernist literature

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Stephen Unwin in Byline Times quotes Virginia Woolf's for Sunday 9 January 1915. She and her husband Leonard had been out for a "very good walk" along the Thames towpath from Richmond to Kingston, when they encountered "a long line of imbeciles":

"The first was a very tall man, just queer enough to look at twice, but no more; the second shuffled, and looked aside; and then one realised that everyone in that long line was a miserable, ineffective, shuffling, idiotic creature with no forehead, or no chin, and an imbecile grin, or a wild suspicious stare. It was perfectly horrible. They should certainly be killed."

This is appalling, but not such a shock if you know how widespread support for eugenicist ideas was in the early 20th century.

I have blogged before about Keynes and Beveridge's support for this cause, and John Carey once published a book, The Intellectuals and the Masses, that looked at the repugnant political views of a host of renowned literary figures, including George Bernard Shaw, D.H. Lawrence and W.B. Yeats.

Some of these were Fabian socialists - the Guardian obituary for Paul Johnson reveals that Leonard Woolf was a member of the New Statesman board as late as 1965.

But most were modernist literary figures and we should have learnt by now that there is no necessary connection between an innovative approach to literary forms and liberal politics.

As Edward Mendelson's wrote in his introduction to W.H. Auden: Selected Poems,

Auden was the first poet writing in English who felt at home in the twentieth century. He welcomed into his poetry all the disordered conditions of his time, all its variety of language and event. 

In this, as in almost everything else, he differed from his modernists predecessors such as Yeats, Lawrence, Eliot or Pound, who had turned nostalgically away from a flawed present to some lost illusory Eden where life was unified, hierarchy secure, and the grand style a natural extension of the vernacular.

So it should not be such a surprise that the literary figure of this era who was most securely opposed to eugenicist ideas, and saw most clearly where they might lead, was the wacky Catholic apologist G.K. Chesterton.