Privatisation
The present study runs within a framework (developed elsewhere) defining the political ideology of recent Britain. This dwells (simplifying other aspects into an aside) on privatisation, anti-communism, and liberal Empire. These causes enjoyed powerful backing from elite circles, resources were invested in developing a way of representing them for easy access by the electorate, and this efficient codifying makes it easy for us to analyse these image-complexes in poetry. Once occupied by such universally available messages, certain objects were contaminated, no longer readily available for use in poems without effortful purging; the poets either deliver the authorised messages, or else move into an outland, where the official symbols are notably missing. In the outland, different hierarchies and alliances emerge, fitfully.
The classic statement on privatisation was made by the British Pavilion at the 1937 Paris Exhibition (whose flourish of subtitle we will erase). In an atmosphere of international tension, flanked by the Soviet and German pavilions, fantasies of gigantism that reduced architecture to a weightlifting competition, the British contribution was wholly about leisure and sport. The central theme (selected by Frank Pick) was "English words in French": a small group, led by le weekend, which in aggregate represented the high development of outdoor sport and leisurewear developed by the English rich in the early nineteenth century. Most aspects of pleasure were more highly developed in France, which of course did not borrow any words where it was pleased with its own. These aspects made visible the pleasures of peace, but also drew attention to English commodities, exported to the well-off in other countries, and produced by "old established" suppliers; foreign currency earners. These retail outlets had, earlier on, made the trappings of aristocratic culture available to the moneyed bourgeoisie; the nobility had, in fact, pioneered the lifestyle of total leisure. This was not part of the message. Pick's approach privatised the struggle of ideologies: the German State was confronted with British families and individuals, the "illustrations" of a consumer society, motivated by trade and commodities. Ritualised competition- via sports, and via competitive shopping- dissipated the energies which could amass into war and conquest. Monumental, strictly useless, display façades, were contrasted with comfortable bourgeois interiors, settings for family life. Implicitly, the State is reduced to another old, traditional, supplier of specialised goods to the families, the real centres of power.
All of this realised propaganda ideas which had been developed elsewhere, notably by Stephen Tallents.
Amateurism, playful conflict, the degage, etc.
In 'The Man Who Knew Too Much' (the original 1934 film, which Hitchcock remade in America twenty years later) we find a run-through of themes of privatisation, occupying part of the foreground as ideas which a mass audience recognized and was interested by. Briefly, the plot is that a family is on holiday at a Swiss resort when a British agent gets in touch with one of them before being murdered; he passes on the information he has obtained to one of our holiday makers. Agents of an unspecified power kidnap his daughter, so that he subsequently refuses to pass the information on to British Intelligence. Back in London, he works out from the obscure message where the agents are; they have brought his daughter to London; their plan is to assassinate a foreign politician and so bring about a crisis, perhaps a war, in central Europe. Improbably enough, he and a friend frustrate the plot; a squad of police surround the spies and shoot them; the daughter is saved from imminent death by her mother, a star markswoman, who shoots off the roof an assassin.
The film can be seen as an anti-government story, and so anti-propaganda. This value shifts at various points; but certainly we see the plot as striving to satisfy fans of citizens' rights. Politics are a bad thing because they threaten the little girl's life, even if the power of the state also saves the day, rescuing the father from the hands of the spies. The central drama, i.e. the conflict between duty to one's country and duty to one's family, is resolved by the two protagonists exclusively in favour of the latter. Even wartime propaganda was, we suspect, shaped by the electorate's distrust of the state, a design parameter which always had to be accommodated even though the set intent of the film-makers or writers was specifically to promote the "war effort", which in practice was the state. There is an incident at the start at a ski-jumping competition where the girl runs onto the empty piste just as someone is jumping, forcing him to swerve to avoid her, which we are told could have been fatal for him. We can guess that the parent: child relationship here parallels the state:citizen relationship, with the underlying message that disobedience can be fatal. The film is full of leisure imagery throughout: its props strikingly predict the British show at the 1937 Paris Exhibition. It starts with a lot of winter sports images and makes a scene about the mother playing with the child's toys. This matches with the bantering tone of the dialogue: abstract concerns are far away, and the within-family tone of intimacy and casualness is offered to the audience as something to identify with and to enjoy. Privatisation is also a style of acting. The prominent parts played by the mother and the child are also results of the libertarian style within the family. The mother first appears nearly winning a rifle-shooting contest, and then irritates the husband rather by dancing with someone else. Playful conflict- competitive games, practical jokes, bantering insults- appears throughout, and is contrasted with the deadly seriousness, hierarchical subjugation, and real violence, of the spy gang.
The amateurism of the two sleuths (the husband and his friend) is a favoured device. Evidently this social pattern of privatisation appealed to the British cinema market, who after all bought tickets for the film; but in the mass media the flow goes the other way as well, as the audience is trained to recognise certain patterns as "British", to identify with them, and to expect them to win. If, a few years later, propaganda films concentrated on eccentricity and tradition, it was because a complete dedication to the war machine had already been "tagged" as un-British and undemocratic. In reality the unassailed rights of the citizen were very few in wartime; the unreduced eccentricity admired by the films perhaps reflected the wishes of most of the audience, was perhaps an act of deception. This small-scale resistance and eccentricity were deified, well after the war, in Ealing comedies like 'Passport to Pimlico' and 'The Titchfield Thunderbolt'.
We can compare all this distrust of large-scale organisation to the Apocalyptic movement in poetry, with its concept of the object-machine, which included the state, warfare, the mechanised economy, and so on. This may appear weak as a concept, but it was after all one which people in 1939 could easily recognise and which was close to their own ideas; we can say without inaccuracy that 'The Man Who Knew Too Much' is about the "object-machine"- a real foreign one, and a British one which the characters do not want to come into existence.
There was, after all, a sector of opinion in the 1930s which wanted an all-powerful state. Films extolling privatisation, amateurism, the family, eccentricity, etc. can be seen as propaganda against such a system. The meetings between the police and the bereaved parents, in Hitch's film, can be seen as an example of a relationship in stable tension: where any move which would push things too far invoke stronger forces which nudge it back towards safe ground. Rules matter more than the interests of one side. As a type of relationship, with governing limits, shared tacit knowledge, etc., it resembles the relationships between individuals in the film. It suggests to us that relationships of equality within rules are best, and so of course argues against a totalitarian system, without civil rights.
If we like spontaneity and eccentricity in art, this may reflect our political philosophy, rather than being a universal value. Marxists of the 1930s vintage certainly found an unsystematic approach to art very irritating.
If we think of the whole period from 1937 on as one of advancing individualism, we can link the features glorified in the Pavilion of that year as corresponding to stylistic features of poetry, thus:
dominance of leisure virtuality, playfulness, casualness
importance of competitive ? but possibly, stylistic research; importance of games hypotheses and arguments; forming of factions or "teams"
importance of a personal style pursuit of poetic "style" by dissimilation located in fine variations on a shared (and admired) norm
privatisation confinement of poetry either to the "domestic" mode or to refinements of style corresponding to a "personal voice"; avoidance of large themes
dominance of comfort avoidance of difficulty (but difficulty may be part of competition?)
individualism dissimilation of style
The habit of virtualisation is one that increases rather constantly throughout our period, with advances made in one decade being realisations of what was dimly perceived in a previous one. Shifts towards virtual situations in poetry, the poem as game, form for example one of the salient differences between the poets emerging in the 1980s and 1990s and their immediate predecessors, who were still interested in politics and the nature of the social order. The anthology Foil was a moment which revealed this change.
We can equate such favouring of the intimate and amateur in film with the purging of rhetoric from poetry. This stylistic move is not completely free from social and historical bonds. Rhetoric equates with high office: with authorization to speak within formal organizations like the Church and the State, although also with aristocrats, whose position was effectively to be part of the State. Rhetoric has been much used in the 20th C by Communists, who are speaking ex officio as officials of a future government. Great caution should be used in treating rhetoric chronologically, since careful examination will find it surviving in great quantities in contextually conditioned choices, so that the rise in relative importance of the casual mode has not expelled the highflown-rhetorical mode. The significant thing about symbolic speeches is not that they don't exist in cinema, but the complexity of the build-up by which the audience is led to accept them. We remember Hollywood films more for big emotional speeches than for chase scenes or wisecracks. During the Second World War, cinema found ways of having characters state war aims and express the ideals which were at stake in a war against fascism. Religious cinema is not one of the genres that interest cinephiles, the kind who write books, but a lot of films have been made that are religious, and so include destiny and transcendence in some form; Cecil B De Mille doesn't vanish just because no-one with intelligence watched his films.
(Alex?) Seago's book Burning the box of beautiful things is about attitudes at the Royal College of Art during the 1950s, with much of the information being supplied by interviews with Len Deighton. Most of the students at this post-graduate institution were going on, of course, to become commercial artists, with only a minority able to make a living as fine artists. As the designers of the visual background to all kinds of publications and performances and installations, they were the successors to wartime propagandists, and the future makers of a national mythology. The shift away from public spirit, work, and duty to leisure, consumption, and frivolity is especially clear in their attitudes and plans for careers; their ruthlessness was due to a keen perception of a shift of climate among employers, which their teachers were facing away from. Jack Beddington (of Shell and the Ministry of Information) appears in the book, not as a machiavellian manipulator of national myths, but as a patron whose love of good taste, draughtsmanship, and the countryside, was thoroughly out of date and stood for the inferiority of British advertising agencies in competition with their American rivals. Magazines designed by the new generation would fit the ads in them, and both would be oriented towards speed, sex, gadgets, sensation, lack of restraint, youth, and the display of wealth. Simultaneously, the Pop painters were using paint to imitate effects of (American) magazine layout, pinups, ads, and design of retail objects. So many things changed, in this build-up to the 1960s (whose visual appearance was partly the invention of these students), that the obvious decline of government propaganda, in favour of ads celebrating leisure and affluence, gets forgotten. Deighton's novels are sharply evocative of the mid 1960s, although they relate to a time slightly earlier than that; as spy stories, they relate to a governmental sphere of action, but their style is that of an advertisement (of the new, aggressive kind that Deighton dreamed about while at the Royal College of Art) spun out. The early ones are very good, especially The IPCRESS File and Funeral in Berlin. The former contains an acronym for a method of conditioning captives during interrogation, a kind of hash of real Cold War techniques, which is really an- unconscious? -reference to advertising, where repetition and glaring visual design are supposed to affect the consumer's will to resist.
One of the key changes in graphic design was the replacement, following American practice, of drawings (woodcuts, etc.) with photographs. The new interest in cameras matches Deighton's fascination with gadgets. In poetry, we may well think that a new fascination with "techniques", and a withdrawal from the "personal" style, which resembles the style of a draughtsman, is a parallel process. Technology was a national preoccupation in the 1960s.
The Gunn/Ted Hughes selected poems first published in 1960 (?) is claimed to have sold 100,0000 copies (I do not have a reference for this, it is merely a story that goes the rounds). Obviously, the elements which appealed to Deighton and his student chums- speed, violence, defiance, gratification, dislike of nuance, etc.- were on offer in these two poets, and were significant in attracting so many readers to them. That is, the concept of the Hughes poem was saleable to a wide audience because it fulfilled an underlying program (of speed, successful violence, toughness, domination) which the audience had seen thousands of times before, realised in media other than poetry. This is perhaps the message to poets: to seize a pattern which is very familiar. Such patterns are not "archetypal", and in fact the notion of archetype is probably without scientific reality; they are taught within works of art, and vary as fashions in the media vary. If in Deighton and Hughes we find the aestheticisation of violence, we understand that this was found pretty generally in the "entertainments world" of the 1960s, and was develped more rapidly in the USA. It follows the Second World War, which was a real experience which was stylised by films, comic books, posters, etc., as subordinate aspects of a reporting or propaganda function; as people became more tired of the war, recycled quite endlessly during the 1950s, and as the two named functions lost all relevance, aestheticisation became the dominant function. In Hughes, climactically, violence became a rigid pattern detached form any context, and able to be sustituted into any context; classic symptoms of aestheticisation. I have mentioned Gunn less, because his poems don't match up to the saleable image he enjoyed around 1960. To be sure, his eye redesigned aggressive masculinity in a sexual way, and this is another aestheticisation of violence. His themes were more of existentialism and acquiring a rigid, desocialised behaviour code.
Someone looking for a continuous line through 20th C poetry would find a pattern in Housman and Masefield which is repeated in Hughes. To be sure, the pattern has to be reduced to a level of considerable generality, or vagueness, in order to fit at both ends. The central figure is a male rebel, unable to comply with the compromsies of society, charged with irrational biological power. Both poets have a belief in fate while rejecting discursive reason (or at least finding it unnecessary). The "law" which puts an end to Housman's Borders heroes is no longer the government, but some mysterious set of impersonal imperatives, in Hughes. The continuity in the figure of the animal is clearer; important in the poems of Ralph Hodgson and DH Lawrence, symbolically developed by Edwin Muir, it was quite familiar when Hughes picked it up. The beauty of the animal is reflected not only in its capacity for violence but also in its freedom from thought.
Hughes' imaginative world is just the opposite of Robert Bridges' one. Bridges abolishes conflict, Hughes reduces everything to it. Bridges tries to remove change form time, Hughes is concerned with high-speed interactions where short time intervals make a great deal of difference to the state of events. We can hardly find Hughes on the map unless we realise his negatory position, denying the shared wishes, or fantasies, of the Anglican party in English literary life; the breaker of collusion. Hughes is apolitical in the sense that his poems are not semantically labelled enough for us to say whether his conflict images reflect the Second World War, the First World War (important to his family), the class struggle, the Cold War, or the struggle between men and women. Almost certainly, he wanted them to hang in "suprapolar space", outside temporal reality.
Alan Sinfield started the debate on privatisation with his ground-breaking study of Anglicanism and literature (1945-70), where he talks about the decline of the Church as the public ritual place of the culture, and how collective worship lost its conviction (as described in various poems), to be replaced by private devotions. Hughes fits into this constellation, as his mythology is essentially personal; unhindered by any set doctrine, he writes an account of the arcana of the universe which is private and imrpovised by himself. He was successful partly because he took on the new situation with joy and enthusiasm, rather than being attracted to regret and disenchantment which inhibited exploration.
In an era of multiple disestablished cosmologies, myth systems compete, like Hughes' fierce animals, or like products in a supermarket. The competition is governed by silent rules.
My study of propaganda as a source for poetry began with events around 1930, which I found fitted easily into configurations which I could grasp and manipulate. The fact that I found this harder to do for a later period- the one for which I had a great deal of knowledge of poetry- may not be mere chance, but may derive from a shift in the quality of social experience, tangled up with the increased importance of leisure; the rise in disposable income; the new significance of consumer choice and of variety; the new social mobility; an increase in education and so in "conscious choice" at various levels of existence; and the collapse of binding codes of ethics, and of the authority of parents, clergymen, etc., who spoke for those codes. Although individuals are still animated by ideals and norms, the norms in question have volatilised, becoming impossibly numerous and shifting. The era of war thinking ended in the early 1960s; it did not vanish, but it became subdominant and old-fashioned, and the groups which still represented it lost much of their power and attractiveness. Of course, it would be unreasonable to find anything else in the centre of Fifties culture than the Cold War; I am inclined to define the whole era from 1914 to 1965 as one of national peril and cultural mobilisation. We are still drenched in propaganda, but it is now predominantly advertising aimed at consumers; this does not lend itself to generalisations, because of the diversity of products and producers, and the inventiveness of the creators, who are asked (by the very terms of consumerism) to appeal to fantasy and not to "laws" of life, which would be repetitive (and save the sociologist effort).
The decline of governmental propaganda is a tangled issue. The central visual authority was, after 1945 or 1950, the advertising agencies. The formula was "anticommunism abroad plus consumerism and welfare at home", and the balance between military spending and spending by the household, on durables or luxuries, was one of the key figures in post-war society; it improved spectacularly from the mid-1950s, after recovery from the financial effects of the war. The advertising world did propaganda for consumption, the government and the right-wing press did propaganda for anti-communism, propaganda for welfare was largely missing. This was an odd result. It's reasonable to say that the past 50 years have seen the realisation of the affluent, individualised, household-dominated, consumer society envisaged in the 1937 Exhibition; but this society is real for those bought by it, while for the poor it is only a thin film of sick hallucination.
The government was, in the 1950s, no longer controlling the imagery of the media. The "residual body" of the Ministry of Information was the Information Research Division of the Foreign Office, which was closed in 1977. If the 1950s were rigid, afraid of deviants, paranoid about communism, etc., this "tone" is just like IRD but was the product of conformism among the producers of culture, not of widespread intervention by IRD or its allies. The resistance of the poetry establishment to innovations, coming along thick and fast after 1960, was simply a defence mechanism, although it did exhibit the qualities of rigidity, paranoia, etc., which the candidates of the 1950s had cultivated in order to win the competition for literary jobs and positions in the High Cold War era.
IRD was a Cold War outfit, and appears to have grown more and more inflexibly paranoid and anti-communist with the years; the suspicion that this was the only direction in which the government saw a threat to the established order needs to be modified by considering the colonial wars, which IRD insisted on seeing as an aspect of communism. The public were never asked to fight wars against freedom, the subject races only wanted the latter as a result of communist conspiracy. (The theory that the Cold War was essentially directed against the Third World, with Soviet rivalry as a pretext, is perhaps more than piquant.) IRD could only play one tune. 'Counter-insurgency" is one of those euphemistic words, a favourite replacement for "imperialism" "oppression" "elimination of political opponents" "punitive expeditions" and so on. IRD's role in invisibly affecting the climate of public opinion (against strikers, against anti-Western troublemakers in the former colonies, against Soviet influence, against leftists at home, against any foolhardy questioning of the Atlantic Alliance) depended at the time on secrecy and deniability; this is hard to assess, which of course could mean that those few hundred specialists were simply wasting public money. Their favoured method was truthfulness plus selectivity. Links to the political police, to right-wing trade unionists, to the CIA's efforts in controlling Western European politics, and to various think-tanks, academics, and periodicals need to be borne in mind. Far more significant, probably, were the media controlled by private business, sluicing out views on current events which hardly annoyed IRD, and which made money at the same time. This commercial appeal depended partly on familiarity, as the typical soldier of wartime propaganda was adapted into the war films of the 1950s and 60s, and into the spy (a Cold War soldier) of many other films; and partly on patriotism, drawing on simple ideas of national interest. A TV series like The Professionals (policemen often involved in anti-terrorist violence) thus has rather obvious roots in the conventions and shared fantasies of wartime propaganda-while also being made for money and indeed very popular.
As we saw, the British propaganda line against 1930s totalitarianism was that an "open" society allowed individual freedom by defending civil rights, and achieved prosperity through this; eccentricity, individualism, and a primary concern with leisure, were ideological values structurally necessary to the construction of any pro-British propaganda. Virtuality, and a preoccupation with personal style, transfer those values into poetics. Poetry which pursues those values, consequently, can be interpreted as supporting the British Image, as devised by the chief government ideologists of the 1930s, even when the poets writing it announce their own status as radical and unofficial figures of independence.
Obviously, there were other propaganda efforts for the USA, and for other Western democracies; although these bore structural resemblances to the British version, I haven't done the research to find out just how different they were. I'm sure that American propaganda was very influential in Britain, but I suspect the message (of individualism etc.) was very similar to the one being put over by the ideological agencies in Britain.
The terrifying thing about modern poetry is that there is no centre. In 16th C Wales, you study the noble families and you're there; and they aspire to common goals, competing with each other. They're all in the same horizon. It's so easy. Praise poetry actually tells you what the objects of status competition are.
I suppose my interest in the IRD is a nostalgia for easy solutions. Totalitarian societies are so easy to grasp; you just look at where the power is, trace the sponsored culture. The editors work for the political police, and they tell the poets what to write. In free societies, culture has got nothing to do with the political centre, and you're forced to descend to the level of the household, where there are millions of entities and civil process does not leave a paper trail, and try to spot patterns, groping at ideas like "status competition through objects" to keep from drowning. Sociology is the proper science of democratic and commercial societies, just as anthropology is the product of the administrative needs of imperialism, having to look after defeated Apaches, Sikhs, Kabyles, Maoris, etc., in the aftermath of bloody territorial wars. Consumer society is like a segmentary society: you don't look at the monumental erections of State and Church, you have to look for the underlying patterns of poetry in the layout of the dwelling, in the ordering of domestic space, the messages worked into the objects of interior decoration.
The problem of the poets, in our period, may be just this: to find a central space in which to write poems that interest someone outside their friends and family.