John Carey and The Intellectuals and the Masses

The death of John Carey, the critic and former Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford, has been reported today. I discovered him through his 1992 book The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880–1939, which skewered the snobbish and anti-democratic attitudes that pervaded modernist literature and Fabian politics.

Here is Ian Hamilton reviewing Carey's book in the London Review of Books the year it came out:

The book is not meant to be straight literary criticism. It is about attitudes, not artworks. And on the matter of attitudes, Carey’s testiness can be joyously unreined. He has no patience with high-flown talk about predicaments and alienation. He is first of all an educator. His sympathies are with readers rather than with writers and he believes that, with the advent of mass literacy, a great educational opportunity was missed. 

Instead of sneering at Leonard Bast’s pretensions, Forster should have been teaching him at night school. But that could never have happened because, however the intellectuals chose to dress up their disdain, it was actually class-based – it had its roots in a fear and loathing of the mass, a revulsion which in some cases turned into super man delusions or fantasies of mass-extermination.

Carey's views are, I think, less controversial now than they were when The Intellectuals and the Masses was published, yet the idea that modernist writers must be, or at least ought to be, on the side of social progress was held for many decades.

Here's my own personal Thirties poet W.T. Nettlefold expressing a generation's sense of betrayal when T.S. Eliot's Conservative politics and adherence to the Church of England became known:

HOW NICE for a man to be clever,
So famous, so true
So sound an investment how EVER
So nice to be YOU.

To peer into basements, up alleys,
A nose for the search.
To challenge with pertinent sallies,
And then JOIN the Church.

I had a very good teacher for A level English Literature, but I have shaken off his taste for the modernists over the years, now preferring Dickens and Auden to his gods Lawrence and Eliot. And I suspect we can all see now what Edward Mendelson's wrote in his introduction to W. H. Auden: Selected Poems in 1979:

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. 

All of this Auden rejected.

I commend The Intellectuals and the Masses to anyone with an interest in the literature and politics of the early 20th century.

W.T. Nettlefold: Selected Poems

Take a look at the books in this job lot of from a long-closed online auction. The red volume on the left of the photo is clearly labelled:

W.T. Nettlefold
Selected Poems

Yes, my own personal Thirties poet produced a collection of his work, though I would guess that it was a private publication.

Another glimpse of my own personal Thirties poet W.T. Nettlefold

A search of the British Newspaper Archive finds W.T. Nettlefold at a meeting the London Branch of the Left Book Club Poetry Group held in Hampstead in the first week of June 1939.

Bill Nettlefold was a neighbour of my mother's aunt and cousin in Bexleyheath and turned out to have been a minor poet in the 1930s. I blogged about meeting him when I was 17 - think of it as my homage to Hazlitt's My First Acquaintance with Poets.

There were three reading at that 1939 meeting and the other two - Paul Potts and Randall Swingler - were both names in their day.

But Hampstead News liked our man best.

An electrician, who matured into a poet only two years ago, "Bill" Nettlefold was the simplest writer and for that reason he has a direct appeal to the "working classes".

"Combustion" and "Analogy" showed the influence of his industrial environment. "Spring also Stirs," was a moving and curious piece, with market qualities. It has a peculiar thread of unity; "Remembrance Day" is a bitter, vivid verse.

Nettlefold does turn up in books on the period from time to time. The page is not available online, but he gets a mention in Marina MacKay's chapter on Total War in A History of 1930s British Literature, which was edited by Benjamin Kohlmann and Matthew Taunton and published by Cambridge University Press in 2019.

What we can see is the first subheading in MacKay's chapter, "'Purchase the Poppies while You May': the Persistence of the Great War," which includes a quotation from Nettlefold's Remembrance Day. 

You can find the full poem in a comment on my post about meeting Bill Nettlefold.

If there is to be a Nettlefold revival, I am up for it.

Three more poems by W.T. Nettlefold

Embed from Getty Images

One of my favourite posts on this blog is the one about Bill Nettlefold. He was a minor poet of the 1930s whom I met as a teenager and later found quoted in the introduction of the Penguin anthology Poetry of the Thirties.

The poem quoted in that introduction, an odd and angry denunciation of T.S. Eliot, was the only Bill Nettlefold poem I had ever found.

That was until a couple of days ago, when someone very kindly posted three more of his poems as a comment on my original post.

They are all derivative of the young W.H. Auden and thus very much to my taste.

Here is one of them, published in Left Review in December 1937.

A Lullaby for a Baby Born in 1937 

Oh hush thee my baby and sleep while you can,
The days that are flying will make you a man.
Sleep deeply my baby, 'tis I who should cry,
The Masters are planning the way you shall die. 

The mining and blasting, the coal that we hew,
The steel we are casting, are, baby, for you.
To mortgage your future, the brain blood and bone;
Your life an investment to cover their own. 

Oh stay as a baby, stay just where you are,
So tiny and helpless, yet bright as a star:
But buds break to blossom as brief moments fly,
And Masters are planning the way you shall die.

Dylan Thomas and Richard Jefferies

Dylan Thomas was born 100 years ago today. Though my own personal 1930s poet W.T. Nettlefold told me Thomas never bought his round, I am happy to celebrate his centenary with his reading of Fern Hill:



This poem reminds me of the last lines of Wood Magic by Richard Jefferies:

Bevis gathered the harebell, and ran with the flower in his hand down the hill, and as he ran the wild thyme kissed his feet and said: "Come again, Bevis, come again". At the bottom of the hill the waggon was loaded now; so they lifted him up, and he rode home on the broad back of the leader.

And it that sounds twee, don't be deceived. Wood Magic - the most underrated of Jefferies' books - is anything but. The natural world the young Bevis discovers is a thoroughly Darwinian one.

Jefferies does not use nature to point lessons for human politics: rather he uses the ruthlessness of that politics as a metaphor to help us understand nature.

The poet W.T. Nettlefold

When I was a teenager - I would guess this was in 1977 - my mother and I went to visit her cousin and aunt who lived close to one another in Bexleyheath. Also present at the lunch was a neighbour of theirs called Bill Nettlefold.

He turned out to have been a poet as a young man and to have moved in London literary circles. After serving in World War II he had taken up a respectable career in the civil service. He had recently retired from that and, as I recall, had lost his wife too.

We got on well and after lunch, to escape the family for a while, I went back to his house for a cup of tea and to talk about writers. It was heaven for a bookish sixth former who was just discovering the figures he had met.

I can recall two of his stories. He used to go drinking with Dylan Thomas and Thomas never bought his round. And he had once sent some poems to Orwell at Tribune, but Orwell never replied.

He also said that he was a Nettlefold as in Guest, Keen & Nettlefolds, but that none of the family money had come down to him.

Years later I bought a copy of Robin Skelton's Penguin anthology Poetry of the Thirties. It has an introduction in which Skelton discusses the movements and controversies of the decade.

At one point he talks about the sense of betrayal many felt when T.S. Eliot, seen as the leading Modernist, turned to religion and Conservatism.

Skelton writes:

Moreover, behind the jokes there was often, one feels, real shame, real anger, as perhaps in: 

FAN MAIL FOR A POET 

To he read over a network of high-power Radio Stations by an American Hot-gospeller

HOW NICE for a man to be clever,
So famous, so true
So sound an investment how EVER
So nice to be YOU.

To peer into basements, up alleys,
A nose for the search.
To challenge with pertinent sallies,
And then JOIN the Church.

First comes Prufrock. then Sweeney. and then
Thomas à Becket.
How frightfully nice of the good men
In cloth to forget it.

The broad-hacked hippo so weak and frail
Succumbed lo the shock.
But the TRUE Church now can never fail,
Based upon ‘THE ROCK.

As a POET you visit today
The NICE Portuguese.
You can help England so in this way
I DO hope you please.

You WILL watch Spain’s terrible border;
Take care where you tread.
How AWFUL for England if you were
Shot down for a RED’

I like you, and whats more I READ you:
There are such a few
Christian Poets so nob1e indeed you
Must know it — YOU DO.

How nice for a man to be clever
So famous, so true
So sound an investment how EVER
So nice to be YOU.

W. T. NETTLEFOLD

This poem is a lament for a lost leader. Eliot had betrayed the admiration and respect shown him by the thirties men, not only by turning to orthodox religion after his mockery of it, but also by visiting a fascist country which was helping Franco in the Spanish Civil War. This again illustrates the way in which a poet was regarded as a person whose actions were as publicly important as his poems.

I don't suppose there were two poets called Nettlefold active in the 1930s, so this must be my Bill Nettlefold. It is not great poetry - I suspect you had to be around at the time to understand this sense of betrayal - but I was delighted and astounded to find it in the Penguin book.

Another book, Modernism and Mourning by Patricia Rae, mentions a Nettlefold poem ("Lullaby for a Poet Born in 1937") in a footnote, and he also had something included in a 1944 anthology Poetry London X.

Those are the only traces of Bill Nettlefold I can find on the internet, but I am glad that I met him.