Anti-Humanism in the Counterculture

Guy Stevenson
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Anti-Humanism in
the Counterculture
Guy Stevenson
Anti-Humanism in the Counterculture
 Guy Stevenson

Anti-Humanism
in the Counterculture
Guy Stevenson
Goldsmiths University of London
London, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-47759-2    ISBN 978-3-030-47760-8 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47760-8

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
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 Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at

the University of Edinburgh for giving me the time, space and financial
support to make a start on this book. My deepest thanks too to Caroline
Blinder, Florian J. Seubert, Henry Mead, Sarah Garland, John Bolin,
Randall Stevenson and Aaron Jaffe, for all your helpful encouragement
and advice along the way.

v
 Contents

1 Introduction: Romanticism, Humanism and the

Counterculture  1

2 Henry Miller and the Beats: An Anti-­humanist Precedent 19

3 Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Their Transcendentalist

Gloom 59

4 William Burroughs’ Immodest Proposal107

5 The Philosophy of Hip: Norman Mailer’s ‘Spiritual

Existentialism’147

6 Conclusion: Counterculture Then and Now187

Index215

vii
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Romanticism, Humanism

and the Counterculture

No Bob Dylan Without Ezra Pound

In 1975, Allen Ginsberg, Beat poet and elder statesman of what had
recently been christened the counterculture, gave a lecture on modern
poetry to students at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at
the Naropa Institute, Colorado. ‘I would venture to say’, Ginsberg told
his audience, ‘that there would have been no Bob Dylan without Ezra
Pound’ (Staff 2017). On the face of it, it was an unlikely and provocative
connection for Ginsberg to have made. In style and politics, Pound repre-
sented much of what the Beat Generation and its literary descendants
purported to stand against. His were the aesthetics of ‘concrete’ precision
not freeform expression, of modernising through engagement with tradi-
tion rather than the radical renunciation promoted by the Beats. Moreover,
Pound’s early twentieth-century movement—born in London in the run-
­up to First World War and including T.S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis and the
philosopher-poet T.E. Hulme—was by 1975 synonymous with a right-­
wing politics entirely contrary to the social and political ideologies
Ginsberg—and certainly Bob Dylan—adhered to.
From Eliot’s conservative Anglo-Catholicism to Hulme’s, Lewis’ and
Pound’s flirtations with fascism, these so-called Men of 1914 practised a
public politics that in the post-Second World War West marked them out
as relics of the dark and not-so-distant past.1 Add to this that Ginsberg and
Dylan were both Jewish, that Pound, Eliot and Lewis had tolerated and at
points promoted anti-Semitism, and that Pound had been exposed very

© The Author(s) 2020 1

G. Stevenson, Anti-Humanism in the Counterculture,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47760-8_1
2 G. STEVENSON

publically for siding with Mussolini during the war, and the genealogy
sounds even less tenable. Crowds like the one Ginsberg addressed at
Naropa were used to hearing Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson and
William Blake cited as Romantic, democratic influences on the Beat move-
ment, and were no doubt puzzled by his claim of kinship with a poet
whose public image screamed elitist obscurantism and fascist
anti-Semitism.
And yet that statement of affinity is critical to a proper understanding
not only of Ginsberg as poet but about the post-Second World War move-
ment he came to signify. Apart from Pound’s anomalous but very real
poetic influence on late twentieth-century American letters, it speaks to a
connection where most see a rupture between early century European
modernism and the youth rebellion that emerged across the United States
after 1945. This book is an attempt to understand that connection, to
understand the Beat Generation and the literary counterculture it spawned
as products rather than straightforward reactions against the philosophy
and politics of writers like Pound, Eliot and Lewis—writers whose own
rebellions were centred on the tiredness of standard humanist and
Romantic traditions. In the popular and academic imagination, those tra-
ditions are exactly what Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs
aimed to restore. There was, the story goes, a struggle towards a better
understanding of self through literature with the purpose of liberating the
individual from societal and psychological oppression; in short, the kind of
transcendence through interior contemplation that Romantic poets Ralph
Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman had exulted in the nineteenth century.
It would of course be absurd to deny the Beat Generation’s debt to that
American Transcendentalist tradition and to present them as opposed to
humanism per se. Their work is permeated by a longing for progress, both
for the individual and for the collective. Ginsberg in particular spent most
of his career railing publically against social injustice and trying to guide
young people towards the construction of a harmonious social and politi-
cal world. By 1966, as Theodore Roszak points out, he had ‘committed
himself totally to the life of prophecy … allowed his entire existence to be
transformed by the visionary powers with which he conjures and has
offered it as an example to his generation’ (Roszak, p. 128). Although not
engaged publically in politics, Kerouac and Burroughs both envisioned
the human race as brimming with potential but limited by misconceived
mechanisms of control. However, much of what these writers produced in
the 1950s and 1960s also carried with it a paradoxical uncertainty about
 1 INTRODUCTION: ROMANTICISM, HUMANISM AND THE COUNTERCULTURE 3

whether mankind truly was perfectible, an uncertainty that can be traced

back to a period in Anglo-American—and European—literary history
when philosophical and political humanism had continually been called
into question.

Anti-humanism/Anti-Romanticism
Before going further, it is important to define exactly what I mean by
‘humanism’, ‘anti-humanism’ and indeed ‘the counterculture’. The
Oxford English Dictionary categorises humanism in two connected but
distinct ways: first as ‘a rationalist outlook or system of thought attaching
prime importance to human rather than divine or supernatural matters’
and secondly, ‘a Renaissance cultural movement which turned away from
medieval scholasticism and revived interest in ancient Greek and Roman
thought’ (Oxford Dictionaries, n.d.). The first, more familiar definition
refers to the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, a sea change in
philosophical thought represented most enduringly by Immanuel Kant
and involving the attempt to understand human existence as determined
by humans themselves rather than deific forces. The second historical-­
cultural definition refers to a shift in religious study, beginning in the late
fourteenth century and involving the attempt to improve society by
broadening the scope of Christian thought to include forgotten Latin and
Ancient Greek texts, both Christian and Pagan.
As Renaissance historian John Hale points out, though the roots of
Enlightenment humanism lie firmly in the Renaissance, this earlier form is
best kept ‘free from any hint of either “humanitarianism” or “humanism”
in its modern sense of rational, non-religious approach to life’ since ‘its
students in the main wished to supplement, not contradict [Christian doc-
trine], through their patient excavation of the sources of ancient God-­
inspired wisdom’ (Hale 1981, p. 171). I’ll come to pose questions related
to Renaissance humanism—particularly around the quasi-religious posi-
tions taken up by many of the Beat writers—but the focus of this book is
the ebb and flow in twentieth-century letters of a faith in the human
potential for progress—and for arriving eventually at a point of perfec-
tion—that arose out of the Enlightenment’s usurpation of religion.
This is what the philosopher John Gray, in his 2002 book Straw Dogs,
calls the ‘upshot of [Arthur] Schopenhauer’s criticism of Kant’, that in his
aim ‘to replace traditional religion by faith in humanity’, Kant arrived
‘only [at] a secular version of Christianity’s central mistake’—namely, the
4 G. STEVENSON

belief that man could transcend his animal limits and be redeemed (Gray
2002, p. 41). While to different degrees sympathetic to religion, Pound,
Lewis, T.E. Hulme and T.S. Eliot are each representative of a turn among
early twentieth-century experimental writers against that ‘faith in human-
ity’, and in particular against its manifestation in what they saw as corrup-
tive eighteenth-century literary Romanticism. This is an aspect of the
‘anti-humanism’ my title refers to, a belief that ‘attaching prime impor-
tance to human … matters’ had served to produce an ersatz and inade-
quate replacement for fundamental moral and aesthetic values, a form—as
Hulme put it—of ‘spilt’ classicism and religion (Hulme 1994, p. 62).
The equation of literary Romanticism with humanism is complicated
by the fact that Wordsworth, Keats and Coleridge in England and Emerson
and Whitman in America were reacting against the ‘rationalist outlook’
that underpinned the Enlightenment. They were motivated, as Hulme
suggests, by a religious desire to reinstate faith in intuition and beauty in
an age dominated by reason. If that means the Romantics can themselves
be defined as ‘anti-humanist’, my parameters are dictated by a twentieth-­
century definition of humanism that emphasises not rationalism per se but
the negation of humanity’s imperfect nature. Attacking the Romantic and
‘humanist attitude’ together in 1911, Hulme wrote:

When a sense of the reality of … absolute values is lacking, you get a refusal
to believe any longer in the radical imperfection of either Man or Nature.
This develops logically into the belief that life is the source and measure of
all values, and that man is fundamentally good. Instead, then, of/ Man
(radically imperfect) … apprehending … Perfection, −/ you get the second
term (now entirely misunderstood) illegitimately introduced inside the first
[ellipses and brackets Hulme’s own]. This leads to a complete change in all
values. The problem of evil disappears, the conception of sin loses all mean-
ing. (1994, p. 444)

This is the crux of the anti-humanist position I am exploring, a position

of violent reaction against the perceived vanity in believing that people are
fundamentally good. It was a reaction that had its roots in Schopenhauer’s
and Frederick Nietzsche’s nineteenth-century attacks on the Enlightenment
but reached an apex in Anglo-American literary thought as First World
War approached. Within such a paradigm, the Beats’ quest for individual
Enlightenment apparently repeats—in the mid-twentieth century—the
mistakes of the Romantics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As
 1 INTRODUCTION: ROMANTICISM, HUMANISM AND THE COUNTERCULTURE 5

we’ll see, Hulme and the other ‘Men of 1914’ differed in their political
beliefs and affiliations. They also disagreed philosophically about the
power of political and social ideology to effect change—Ezra Pound’s
faith in the possibility of a new economic and political order rendering him
in many ways humanistic as opposed to Hulme and T.S. Eliot, who sought
solace from the political and social in the absolute authority of religion.
But they agreed wholeheartedly that a Romantic bastardisation of abso-
lute ethical and aesthetic truths had obfuscated the Western value scale.
What I suggest is that the Beat inheritors of the Romantic tradition had
a much clearer understanding of man’s radical imperfection, of evil, and
‘the conception of sin’ than is generally acknowledged. They were, on the
one hand, exemplary of the humanism Hulme describes—setting their
stall by ‘life [as] the source and measure of all values’—but, on the other,
not as credulous about the possibilities therein as they first appear. As
importantly and more complicatedly, their inheritance of a modernist
scepticism about progress meant they also unwittingly inherited some of
the same reactionary political baggage—a distrust of liberal democratic
government, a patrician faith in their own clairvoyance as artists and a
fatalistic, superior attitude towards the unconverted herd.

‘The Making of a Counterculture’

Although those philosophical and political legacies were felt across the
wider social, political and cultural scene, this book’s main concern is their
manifestation in literature. Following Theodore Roszak, whose 1969
book The Making of a Counterculture is widely credited with having coined
the term, my countercultural timeline begins with the first Beat publica-
tions in the mid-1950s; continues through Ginsberg’s, Burroughs’ and
Kerouac’s uptake by bohemian poets in San Francisco and New York dur-
ing that decade; then follows their ideas over-ground in the 1960s. Clichéd
though it has become, the critical consensus of a literary and philosophical
tone set by these three and picked up by Ken Kesey, Hunter S. Thompson,
Norman Mailer and others is borne out by both the texts themselves and
first-hand accounts of the period.
Kerouac and Ginsberg’s attempts at self-exploration through explora-
tion of the continent and the continent through exploration of their selves
are the acknowledged bases of Kesey’s emblematic bus trip across America,
not to mention the ‘electric kool-aid acid tests’ made famous by Tom
Wolfe in his book about that journey (Wolfe 1968). Kesey, like most
6 G. STEVENSON

writers of the 1960s’ psychedelic movement, credited Kerouac with open-

ing his mind to the possibility of experimentation on ‘the wild road’, and
it was a succession story that was inscribed into national folklore by the
mainstream American media (1994). As Wolfe points out, the two move-
ments even shared a muse in Neal Cassady—the model for Kerouac’s hero
Dean Moriarty in On the Road and the speed-addled ‘monologuist’ driver
of Kesey’s ‘magic bus’ (Wolfe 1968, p. 15). For his part Kerouac was
begrudging but emphatic about his influence on the 1960s. Roped in
aged forty-six to talk about ‘the Hippies’ on William F. Buckley Jr’s ‘The
Firing Line’, he drunkenly and half-regretfully declared them his ‘chil-
dren’ (Hoover Institution Library and Archives 1968).
In a similar spirit as that ‘Firing Line’ TV special, Roszak invented the
word ‘counterculture’ to account for the rift between pre- and post-­
Second World War generations. His aim, he wrote, was to better under-
stand an epoch in which ‘a militant minority of dissenting youth’ pitted
themselves ‘against the sluggish consensus- and coalition politics of their
middle-class elders’ (1969, p. 159). At its point of conception then, ‘the
counterculture’ had connotations of a broad attitudinal change—a shift in
political spirit—rather than anything specifically aesthetic or philosophical.
Since the 1960s, those connotations have become broader still, as ‘counter-­
cultural’ has come to signify any youth movement that declares itself hos-
tile to conventional culture. From 1970s’ punk rock to guerrilla gardening
in the twenty-first century, the countercultural tag abides. Others have
written convincingly about the commercialisation of the counterculture
since the 1960s, and some compelling work has been done on the poten-
tial collusion between countercultural thinkers and the technocratic sys-
tem they purported to oppose.2 Those senses of co-option and collusion
are at the heart of much of my discussion, but I have tried to move away
from general definitions to emphasise literary, spiritual and existential
visions rather than the politics of lifestyle. Unlike Rozsak—who touches
on Ginsberg and the Beats but uses a broad sociological brush to outline
generational changes—I have examined the literary heritage of writers in a
specific period to make better sense first of their politics then the wider
inconsistencies that characterised the times.
By the same token, I have aimed to move beyond pertinent but well-­
worn criticisms of the discrepancy between how the Beats and the Hippies
lived and what they preached. Just as Ann Charters and Brenda Knight
have pointed out the marginalisation of female Beat poets by their patriar-
chal scene, a quick glance at Kesey’s magic bus footage, or at Tom Wolfe’s
 1 INTRODUCTION: ROMANTICISM, HUMANISM AND THE COUNTERCULTURE 7

description of the Merry Pranksters partying with the Hells Angels, reveals
a cast of vulnerable young women whose sexual exploitation was either
condoned or turned a blind eye to in the name of free love (1998). In
terms of race, James Campbell has it right when he reprimands Kerouac,
Ginsberg and Burroughs for lifting black language and music while ignor-
ing contemporary black writers like Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin,
whose own takes on African American culture were naturally less romanti-
cised (1999, p. 209).
While I’ll make reference to these issues throughout the book, it has
not been my purpose to accumulate more evidence in support of what
looks increasingly like an open-and-shut case. What I have tried to do is
examine the relationship between those identity politics and the counter-
culture’s deeper philosophical discrepancies. How did an apparently con-
tradictory pessimism about human progress inform the inability to engage
meaningfully with the oppressed groups they sanctified? How did the indi-
vidual author’s bid for freedom through a marginalised, ‘primitive’ exis-
tence translate in terms of an attitude to these involuntarily marginalised
groups? Where did the fantasy of returning to tribal life—and the reality of
‘dropping out’ from society—leave writers in relation to the tribes they
romanticised? Furthermore, how did they relate first to the young, disaf-
fected and predominantly middle-class tribe their works addressed and
second to the majority group whose culture they were countering?

From Schopenhauer, Through Hulme to Heidegger

These questions—and the larger issue of anti-humanism in the counter-
culture—had their contemporary context in the new theories of ethics,
language and history that emerged across the Atlantic after the Second
World War. As Elizabeth Kuhn points out, most discussions of anti-­
humanist philosophy in literature revolve around the legacy of nineteenth-­
century challenges to Enlightenment conventions not in high modernism
but in the 1960s philosophical enquiries of European Post-Structuralism
or the post-Marxist ideas of the Frankfurt School. From Foucault’s attack
on moral certitude and Jacques Derrida’s deconstructions of the relation-
ship between reality and the written word to Theodore Adorno and Max
Horkheimer’s treatise on ‘the enlightenment as mass deception’, there
was a growing sense after 1945 that the Western humanist tradition had
produced a limiting, malfunctioning model of humanity (2002, p. 94).
This scepticism—a reaction in part but not entirety to the horrors of
8 G. STEVENSON

Auschwitz—has a clear bearing on the writers under discussion in this

book. In the first place, it contradicts but also succeeds Hulme, Lewis and
Pound’s own philosophical anti-humanism, providing a larger, richer
overview of the genealogy from Nietzsche and Schopenhauer’s original
anti-Enlightenment arguments through the ‘Men of 1914’ and into
the 1960s.
This is what Kuhn talks about when she calls anti-humanism ‘a
Nietzschean interest that develops through both literary modernism and,
later, poststructuralist philosophy, and … knits the twentieth century
together in a suspicion of the Enlightenment’ (2011, p. 3). It is also part
of Edward P. Comentale and Andrzej Gasiorek’s thinking on T.E. Hulme,
whose anti-humanist philosophy pre-empted ‘some of the most thought-­
provoking and disruptive modernisms of the twentieth century, such as
the post-Marxism of Adorno and [Hannah] Arendt, the phenomenology
of [Martin] Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, the deconstruction of [Paul]
de Man and Derrida’ (2006, p. 4). With Lewis, T.S. Eliot and various of
his contemporaries, Hulme doesn’t only continue Nietzsche and
Schopenhauer’s mission to test the apparent advances of Enlightenment
thought; he has an intermediary position between these figures and a phil-
osophically anti-humanist line of enquiry after the Second World War.
Indeed, most recent scholarship around Hulme and Lewis in particular
points to their pre-emption of postmodernism, their updating of
continental-­born avant-garde philosophies to service a new mode of think-
ing that was unwittingly ‘already postmodern’ (Tearle 2013, p. 9).
In the second place, that more familiar post-1945 line of enquiry
throws light on the relationship between the Beat Generation and
Existentialism, a philosophy to which Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs
are consistently linked and which is often understood as having consoli-
dated rather than opposed humanist ideas. Jean-Paul Sartre, who the Beats
admired for his rejection of hierarchy and exploration of modern alien-
ation, went to great lengths to assert the humanistic basis of his thought.
In a 1945 lecture entitled ‘Existentialism is a humanism’, Sartre refuted
the charge that he was against the optimistic aims of the Enlightenment.
Neither an ‘invitation to people to dwell in the quietism of despair’ (the
Communist reproach) nor a denial of ‘the reality and seriousness of human
affairs’ (the Christian view), Existentialism was—Sartre claimed—a pro-
gressive atheistic assertion of individual human self-determination (1948,
p. 3). To his ‘first principle’ that ‘Man is nothing else but that which he
makes of himself’, he added a second, that such self-responsibility also
 1 INTRODUCTION: ROMANTICISM, HUMANISM AND THE COUNTERCULTURE 9

makes the individual ‘responsible for all men’ since it entails ‘creating a
certain image of man as [he] would have him to be’ (pp. 3–4).
As well as drawing attention to the pejorative connotations anti-­
humanism carried in the post-war period, Sartre’s passionate self-defence
provides a useful backdrop to the Beats’ philosophical self-contradictions.
Their debt to him, his Existentialist contemporary Albert Camus and—
most importantly—Sartre’s religious predecessor Søren Kierkegaard, situ-
ates them in an Enlightenment tradition of progress for both individual
and species through self-willed action. And yet it also aligns them with a
philosophy that rejected Kantian notions of reason-based morality. Like
the Existentialists, like Kierkegaard and indeed Nietzsche, they measured
life—and progress—according to the individual’s fullness of experience in
each moment, a method that privileged instinct over reason and presup-
posed conventional notions of good and evil as both artificially imposed
and difficult in reality to distinguish from one another. In some respects,
the Beats can be read alongside these Existentialist attempts to realign
rather than supplant the ethics of humanism. They too had to defend
themselves against critics who labelled them quietist or nihilistic, and often
answered—like Sartre—by insisting that they, not the establishment ratio-
nalists, were truly humane.
Ann Charters, who knew Ginsberg and Kerouac and wrote Kerouac’s
first biography, makes the case that the Beat Generation was at heart an
American Existentialist movement, a response to Kierkegaard that differed
in its spiritual component to Sartre and Camus’ but was sympathetic to
these French thinkers (2012, p. 134). If the popular press went too far by
caricaturing ‘Beatniks’ as beret-wearing, chain-smoking Left-Bankists,
there was an affinity in terms of lifestyle and thought that deserves atten-
tion. The Existentialists’ quest for self-definition in a Europe that had
been gutted by war was mirrored in America through the Beats’ fixation
with the individual’s duty to be his or her ‘authentic’ self, but it carried
with it a paradoxically religious zeal. That zeal was both kind and unkind—
the impulse behind Allen Ginsberg and his San Francisco ally Michael
McClure’s insistence that unflinchingly personal poetry could encourage
more merciful behaviour on a social scale as well as the impulse behind
Norman Mailer’s sanctification of the brutal ‘hipster’, whose physical vio-
lence was justified as evidence of his ‘spiritual’ existential freedom.
As we’ll see, it represented a more wholesale inheritance of Kierkegaard’s
philosophy than Sartre, Camus or their contemporaries were prepared or
able to stomach, and it had a lot to do with Europe’s abundance and
10 G. STEVENSON

America’s lack of physical and emotional scars after the Second World War.
Though they were disgusted, like their European counterparts, with the
modes of rationale that had facilitated Auschwitz and Hiroshima, subver-
sive young Americans had a readier faith in the possibility of spiritual
redemption because it was not their continent that had descended to those
lows. Their parents had not voted for or collaborated with Nazi or fascist
ideologues; their cities had not been bombed, ravaged by occupation or
emptied of minorities bound for extermination (traumas that were fresher
and more tangibly felt than the very real but more complicated trauma of
inhabiting a country built on black slave labour). In other words, it was
not only possible for the Beats to write poetry after Auschwitz; they could
continue to believe, where so many European writers and artists categori-
cally could not, in a God of some form or other, fashionable out of the
new materials of the post-war age.
Of course, they and their descendants in the counterculture also built
their version of Existentialism (their new humanism) out of the myths of
America’s past. Intoxicated by nineteenth-century Transcendentalist
visions (Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau and, to a lesser extent,
Ralph Waldo Emerson) and nostalgia for the frontiersman spirit of the
Wild West, and energised—paradoxically—by something like the noncon-
formist religious impulse that first made America possible, Kerouac,
Ginsberg and, in his own way, Burroughs were instinctively opposed to
the atheism behind so much European thought in the late 1940s and
1950s. Indeed Ginsberg, who was always more politically engaged than
his friends, turned to Sartre for validation in the belief that Soviet and
Chinese Communism could be rescued from their worst excesses by atten-
tion to the sanctity of the individual, but he did so with the caveat that
such notions required spiritual ballast.
The lineage between Existentialism and the Beat Generation is compli-
cated further still by Martin Heidegger, who influenced Sartre but raised
phenomenologist objections to him in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Heidegger, cited by Sartre as a fellow ‘existentialist atheist’ in his lecture,
responded with incredulity both to the categorisation of Existentialism as
a humanism and his own philosophy being implicated in this (1948, p. 2).
His 1949 public retort to Sartre echoes Hulme’s criticism of modern
humanism for reducing absolute, sacred truths to falsely comprehensible
categories. To Heidegger, ‘the highest determinations of the essence of
the human being in humanism still do not realise the proper dignity of the
human being’ (1998, p. 251). Humanist efforts to understand humanity
 1 INTRODUCTION: ROMANTICISM, HUMANISM AND THE COUNTERCULTURE 11

through ‘physiological chemistry’ or ‘outfitting the human being with an

immortal soul, the power of reason, or the character of a person’ would
always fall short because they were products of a limited ‘metaphysical
projection’ that denied the spiritual (p. 251).
What he was getting at was an overemphasis on the material over the
essential, manifested in Sartre’s thinking—Heidegger believed—by the
idea that existence began with ‘human beings’ rather than ‘being’ itself.
Heidegger’s non-religious attack on the limits of humanist thinking brings
another dimension to Hulme’s high modernist comments about ‘spilt reli-
gion’ (1994, p. 62). As Leon Surette points out, an atheist but also a
‘mystic’, Heidegger was in his anti-humanism an intriguing and unlikely
ally to religious modernism (2015, p. 31). His split with Sartre—and with
the belief that human progress depended on each individual taking con-
trol of his or her own actions—also provides a useful way of thinking
about the spiritual component in Beat and countercultural thinking.
Steeped in a self-determination akin to the Existentialists, at the same time
the Beats were—like Heidegger—writing in a mystical tradition that
opposed rationalistic humanist thinking as a negation of ‘the spiri-
tual realm’.
Such gnostic objections ally the Beats and the counterculture with
Romanticism and point to a line of thinking in the 1960s that viewed
them as progressive anti-humanists. Indeed, Theodore Roszak’s original
definition of the counterculture posits it as a revolutionary response to the
humanist logic behind emotionally deadening and politically neutralising
‘technocracy’ (1969, p. 7). By technocracy, he means a ‘society in which
those who govern justify themselves by appeal to technical experts who, in
turn, justify themselves by appeal to scientific forms of knowledge’
(pp. 7–8). The post-Enlightenment drift from religion to science, Roszak
believed, had led to a mode of governing in which every decision was
made according to an empirical standard that discounted emotion, spiritu-
ality, even political ideology. Following the Beats’ lead, Roszak writes, the
youth of 1969 are engaged in ‘a remarkable defection from the long-­
standing tradition of sceptical, secular intellectuality which has served as
the prime vehicle for three hundred years of scientific and technical work
in the West’, and towards paradigms suggested by alternative religious
texts and the use of psychedelic drugs (pp. 141–42). This narrative makes
it possible to view not only nineteenth-century Romanticism but the turn
towards mysticism in the 1960s as itself anti-humanist. Weary and mis-
trustful of Enlightenment rationalism, the Beats and then the Hippies
12 G. STEVENSON

become the vanguard of a ‘youthful renaissance of mythical-religious

interest’, avant-garde protesters against a type of humanism that is no
longer fit for purpose (p. 147).
While keeping these ideas in mind, and testing them against the writ-
ings of the Beats and their successors, I have tried to avoid complicating
my own study by relying too much on Roszak’s sociologically inflected
and reason-centred definition of humanism. Since my purpose is to assess
the extent of a belief in human perfectibility, the reconfiguration of spiri-
tuality and its use in opposition to a faith in reason is of course significant.
As countless Beat scholars have pointed out, Jack Kerouac and Allen
Ginsberg’s experiments with Buddhism, Ginsberg’s with Hinduism and
Ken Kesey’s with LSD were attempts to move beyond what they saw as
limiting and overly cerebral ideas of human progress and towards a version
that emphasised the evolution of consciousness. As we’ll see, on the evi-
dence of what they said and wrote, this was indisputably their aim.
However, what I have set out to explore is not principally the rejection of
old forms of humanism to make way for new ones but an implicit rejection
of the potential for human progress within that project. The Beats, aligned
with English and American Romantics in their mystical distrust of reason,
were also intermittently aware that collective, and even individual prog-
ress, were illusory and in this respect find their twentieth-century prede-
cessors in European modernism.

The Argument
Chapter 2 prepares for this larger discussion of anti-humanism, the coun-
terculture and current-related arguments through a case study of Henry
Miller, a figure who had an important influence on Beat writing and came
out of an inter-war European milieu steeped in anti-humanist ideas. An
American expatriate in 1930s’ Paris, and a writer whose graphic approach
to sex, whose Gnosticism and whose anarchistic politics made him a hero
of 1960s’ cultural revolution, Miller’s work and biography also reveal a
surprising affinity with fascist-sympathising, anti-Romantic early modern-
ists. On the cusp between modernism and the counterculture, his case
establishes first the different political uses that anti-humanist ideas were
put to by writers of the early twentieth century, and second the paradoxi-
cal combination of these ideas with an American Transcendentalist opti-
mism which paved the way for the Beat project twenty years later. Miller’s
promotion by George Orwell as a ‘Whitman among the corpses’ of
 1 INTRODUCTION: ROMANTICISM, HUMANISM AND THE COUNTERCULTURE 13

Europe—and his extraordinary literary relationship with the Mussolini-­

supporting, Imagist poet Ezra Pound—enables an exploration of this
complicated marriage at the root of American countercultural literature.
Chapter 3 identifies the same dissonance between American
Transcendentalist and reactionary European modernist impulses in work
by key writers of the Beat Generation. It demonstrates that Jack Kerouac
and Allen Ginsberg’s self-conscious conception of an avant-garde
Renaissance to rival Emerson and Whitman’s depended on a contradictory
political pessimism. That pessimism was gleaned from the apocalyptic,
anti-humanist atmosphere that pervades early twentieth-century modern-
ist texts. Through analysis of Kerouac’s novel Visions of Cody (written in
1958 but not published until 1972) and Allen Ginsberg’s 1957 poem
‘Howl’, it establishes the paradoxical influence of Oswald Spengler, a
German apocalyptic historian popular in the 1910s, on theories otherwise
predicated on humanity’s perfectibility. This chapter explores John Tytell’s
statement that the Beats’ faith in self—even societal—liberation through
art was always tempered by ‘a Spenglerian expectation of the total break-
down of Western culture’ (2002, p. 9). It points out that Kerouac and
Ginsberg’s identification with the word ‘fellaheen’—Spengler’s suspect
term for non-Western peasants—is indicative of a fatalistic social attitude
at odds with their professed politics. It also points out that this syncretisa-
tion of conflicting attitudes and registers (optimistic and fatalistic, reverent
and irreverent, progressive and regressive, humanist and anti-humanist)
was symptomatic of America’s delayed crisis of modernity, experienced
twenty years after Europe’s.
Chapter 4 looks to William Burroughs, the third principal figure of the
Beat Generation, for evidence of the group’s more direct engagement
with modernist anti-humanism. Burroughs’ deadpan reportage on his life
as a heroin addict, and his hallucinatory allegories of state violence, is read
as the satirical extension of the brutal trend Wyndham Lewis identified in
the 1930s. Where Henry Miller used the anti-humanist rhetoric of his
early modernist predecessors not only to critique humanist hypocrisy but
to push for utopian improvements, Burroughs promoted an even more
radical upheaval. In his 1959 novel Naked Lunch, he intensified Miller’s
irreverently brutal rhetoric for a post-war age, developing a form of satire
that was mercilessly intolerant of benevolent reform yet precariously
hitched to the utopian ideals of Transcendentalism. The result was a sad-
dling of progressivism and disgusted but elated fatalism that had signifi-
cant effects on the literary culture that followed. This chapter compares
14 G. STEVENSON

Naked Lunch to Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, demonstrating

Burroughs’ use of the same early modernist tropes to arrive at this more
extreme—and more complex—version of the anti-humanist reversal.
Chapter 5 brings in the novelist and essayist Norman Mailer—who
styled himself as a ‘philosopher of hip’ and championed both Burroughs
and Miller—to discuss the philosophical grounding of the countercul-
ture’s reaction against humanism (1993, p. 340). This chapter explores
Mailer’s conception of a new ‘spiritual existentialism’ that could enable
America’s post-war generation to engage with the unprecedented social
changes they faced. Paying particular attention to Mailer’s interpretation
of nineteenth-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, the chapter
analyses Mailer’s deliberately provocative statements on the possibility of
getting beyond good and evil through an affirmation rather than denial of
God’s existence. It reads this as an expression of the humanist/anti-­
humanist paradox outlined elsewhere in the book. The controversial 1959
essay ‘The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster’, in which
Mailer more than half seriously celebrates violence as a purgatorial means
of human psychological evolution, is presented as yet another mutation of
the anti-humanist reversal we see in Miller and Burroughs’ work.
The comment from Allen Ginsberg that I quoted at the start—his insis-
tence to his students that Bob Dylan owed his existence to Ezra Pound—
expressed a telling disappointment with the generation he believed the
Beats had sired. It came in response to a young man who has put his hand
up to complain about having to read Pound’s Cantos, a convoluted mod-
ernist epic full of classical and obscure literary, historical and economic
allusions. ‘I was reading Pound’, the student told Ginsberg ‘and all of a
sudden four or five lines from Dylan came into my head—from “Desolation
Row”: “T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound fighting in the captain’s tower while
calypso singers laugh at them and fishermen wave flowers” (Staff 2017). I
just got real frustrated with Pound. I couldn’t understand it. I just wanted
to go wave flowers because it was easier’ (Staff 2017).3
Rather than indulge the sentiment—a parroting not only of Dylan but
Kerouac in fact, who grumbled about Pound and Eliot ‘always trying to
show how fancy they are’—Ginsberg chides the student for intellectual
sloppiness and historical myopia (Maffina 2012, p. 336).4 The literary
counterculture might well be about bringing art back in touch with real
life, he says, but it also follows in a vernacular tradition that draws on dif-
ficult classical allusion. Contrary to lazy public opinion, that tradition
needs to be respected and negotiated through serious thought rather than
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but now an odd lethargy seemed to be upon them, as if they had
been taking some kind of treatment for their complaint. They were
sitting, instruments in hand, gazing in a spellbound manner at a
square-jawed person in ill-fitting dress clothes who had appeared at
the side of Mr. Baermann. And the next moment, there shattered the
stillness a sudden voice that breathed Vine Street in every syllable.
"Ladies and gentlemen," boomed the voice, proceeding, as nearly as
John could ascertain, from close to the main entrance, "will you
kindly take your seats."
"Pinched!" breathed Miss Molloy in his ear. "Couldn't you have
betted on it!"
Her diagnosis was plainly correct. In response to the request, most
of those on the floor had returned to their tables, moving with the dull
resignation of people to whom this sort of thing has happened
before: and, enjoying now a wider range of vision, John was able to
see that the room had become magically filled with replicas of the
sturdy figure standing beside Mr. Baermann. They were moving
about among the tables, examining with an offensive interest the
bottles that stood thereon and jotting down epigrams on the subject
in little notebooks. Time flies on swift wings in a haunt of pleasure
like the Mustard Spoon, and it was evident that the management,
having forgotten to look at its watch, had committed the amiable
error of serving alcoholic refreshments after prohibited hours.
"I might have known," said Miss Molloy querulously, "that something
of the sort was bound to break loose in a dump like this."
John, like all dwellers in the country as opposed to the wicked
inhabitants of cities, was a law-abiding man. Left to himself, he
would have followed the crowd and made for his table, there to give
his name and address in the sheepish undertone customary on
these occasions. But he was not left to himself. A moment later it
had become plain that the dashing exterior of Miss Molloy was a true
index to the soul within. She grasped his arm and pulled him
commandingly.
"Snap into it!" said Miss Molloy.
The "it" into which she desired him to snap was apparently a small
door that led to the club's service quarters. It was the one strategic
point not yet guarded by a stocky figure with large feet and an eye
like a gimlet. To it his companion went like a homing rabbit, dragging
him with her. They passed through; and John, with a resourcefulness
of which he was surprised to find himself capable, turned the key in
the lock.
"Smooth!" said Miss Molloy approvingly. "Nice work! That'll hold them
for a while."
It did. From the other side of the door there proceeded a confused
shouting, and somebody twisted the handle with a good deal of
petulance, but the Law had apparently forgotten to bring its axe with
it to-night, and nothing further occurred. They made their way down
a stuffy passage, came presently to a second door, and, passing
through this, found themselves in a backyard, fragrant with the scent
of old cabbage stalks and dish water.
Miss Molloy listened. John listened. They could hear nothing but a
distant squealing and tooting of horns, which, though it sounded like
something out of the repertoire of the Collegiate Buddies, was in
reality the noise of the traffic in Regent Street.
"All quiet along the Potomac," said Miss Molloy with satisfaction.
"Now," she added briskly, "if you'll just fetch one of those ash cans
and put it alongside that wall and give me a leg-up and help me
round that chimney and across that roof and down into the next yard
and over another wall or two, I think everything will be more or less
jake."

V
John sat in the lobby of the Lincoln Hotel in Curzon Street. A lifetime
of activity and dizzy hustle had passed, but it had all been crammed
into just under twenty minutes, and, after seeing his fair companion
off in a taxicab, he had made his way to the Lincoln, to ascertain
from a sleepy night porter that Miss Wyvern had not yet returned. He
was now awaiting her coming.
She came some little while later, escorted by Hugo. It was a fair
summer night, warm and still, but with her arrival a keen east wind
seemed to pervade the lobby. Pat was looking pale and proud, and
Hugo's usually effervescent demeanour had become toned down to
a sort of mellow sadness. He had the appearance of a man who has
recently been properly ticked off by a woman for Taking Me to Places
Like That.
"Oh, hullo, John," he murmured in a low, bedside voice. He
brightened a little, as a man will who, after a bad quarter of an hour
with an emotional girl, sees somebody who may possibly furnish an
alternative target for her wrath. "Where did you get to? Left early to
avoid the rush?"
"It was this way ..." began John. But Pat had turned to the desk, and
was asking the porter for her key. If a female martyr in the rougher
days of the Roman Empire had had occasion to ask for a key, she
would have done it in just the voice which Pat employed. It was not a
loud voice, nor an angry one,—just the crushed, tortured voice of a
girl who has lost her faith in the essential goodness of humanity.
"You see ..." said John.
"Are there any letters for me?" asked Pat.
"No, no letters," said the night porter; and the unhappy girl gave a
little sigh, as if that was just what might be expected in a world where
men who had known you all your life took you to Places which they
ought to have Seen from the start were just Drinking-Hells, while
other men, who also had known you all your life, and, what was
more, professed to love you, skipped through doors in the company
of flashy women and left you to be treated by the police as if you
were a common criminal.
"What happened," said John, "was this...."
"Good night," said Pat.
She followed the porter to the lift, and Hugo, producing a
handkerchief, dabbed it lightly over his forehead.
"Dirty weather, shipmate!" said Hugo. "A very deep depression off
the coast of Iceland, laddie."
He placed a restraining hand on John's arm, as the latter made a
movement to follow the Snow Queen.
"No good, John," he said gravely. "No good, old man, not the
slightest. Don't waste your time trying to explain to-night. Hell hath
no fury like a woman scorned, and not many like a girl who's just had
to give her name and address in a raided night club to a plain-
clothes cop who asked her to repeat it twice and then didn't seem to
believe her."
"But I want to tell her why...."
"Never tell them why. It's no use. Let us talk of pleasanter things.
John, I have brought off the coup of a lifetime. Not that it was my
idea. It was Ronnie Fish who suggested it. There's a fellow with a
brain, John. There's a lad who busts the seams of any hat that isn't a
number eight."
"What are you talking about?"
"I'm talking about this amazingly intelligent idea of old Ronnie's. It's
absolutely necessary that by some means Uncle Lester shall be
persuaded to cough up five hundred quid of my capital to enable me
to go into a venture second in solidity only to the Mint. The one
person who can talk him into it is Ronnie. So Ronnie's coming to
Rudge."
"Oh?" said John, uninterested.
"And to prevent Uncle Lester making a fuss about this, I've invited
old man Molloy and daughter to come and visit us as well. That was
Ronnie's big idea. Thos. is rolling in money, and, once Uncle Lester
learns that, he won't kick about Ronnie being there. He loves having
rich men around. He likes to nuzzle them."
"Do you mean," cried John, "that that girl is coming to stay at
Rudge?"
He was appalled. Limpidly clear though his conscience was, he was
able to see that his rather spectacular association with Miss Dolly
Molloy had displeased Pat, and the last thing he wished for was to
be placed in a position which was virtually tantamount to hobnobbing
with the girl. If she came to stay at Rudge, Pat might think.... What
might not Pat think?
He became aware that Hugo was speaking to him in a quiet,
brotherly voice.
"How did all that come out, John?"
"All what?"
"About Pat. Did she tell you that I paved the way?"
"She did! And look here...."
"All right, old man," said Hugo, raising a deprecatory hand. "That's
absolutely all right. I don't want any thanks. You'd have done the
same for me. Well, what has happened? Everything pretty
satisfactory?"
"Satisfactory!"
"Don't tell me she turned you down?"
"If you really want to know, yes, she did."
Hugo sighed.
"I feared as much. There was something about her manner when I
was paving the way that I didn't quite like. Cold. Not responsive. A bit
glassy-eyed. What an amazing thing it is," said Hugo, tapping a
philosophical vein, "that in spite of all the ways there are of saying
Yes, a girl on an occasion like this nearly always says No. An
American statistician has estimated that, omitting substitutes like 'All
right,' 'You bet,' 'O.K.,' and nasal expressions like 'Uh-huh,' the
English language provides nearly fifty different methods of replying in
the affirmative, including Yeah, Yeth, Yum, Yo, Yaw, Chess, Chass,
Chuss, Yip, Yep, Yop, Yup, Yurp...."
"Stop it!" cried John forcefully.
Hugo patted him affectionately on the shoulder.
"All right, John. All right, old man. I quite understand. You're upset. A
little on edge, yes? Of course you are. But listen, John, I want to talk
to you very seriously for a moment, in a broad-minded spirit of
cousinly good will. If I were you, laddie, I would take myself firmly in
hand at this juncture. You must see for yourself by now that you're
simply wasting your time fooling about after dear old Pat. A sweet
girl, I grant you—one of the best: but if she won't have you she won't,
and that's that. Isn't it or is it? Take my tip and wash the whole thing
out and start looking round for someone else. Now, there's Miss
Molloy, for instance. Pretty. Pots of money. If I were you, while she's
at Rudge, I'd have a decided pop at her. You see, you're one of
those fellows that Nature intended for a married man right from the
start. You're a confirmed settler-down, the sort of chap that likes to
roll the garden lawn and then put on his slippers and light a pipe and
sit side by side with the little woman, sharing a twin set of head
phones. Pull up your socks, John, and have a dash at this Molloy
girl. You'd be on velvet with a rich wife."
At several points during this harangue John had endeavoured to
speak, and he was just about to do so now, when there occurred that
which rendered speech impossible. From immediately behind them,
as they stood facing the door, a voice spoke.
"I want my bag, Hugo."
It was Pat. She was standing within a yard of them. Her face was still
that of a martyr, but now she seemed to suggest by her expression a
martyr whose tormentors have suddenly thought up something new.
"You've got my bag," she said.
"Oh, ah," said Hugo.
He handed over the beaded trifle, and she took it with a cold
aloofness. There was a pause.
"Well, good night," said Hugo.
"Good night," said Pat.
"Good night," said John.
"Good night," said Pat.
She turned away, and the lift bore her aloft. Its machinery badly
needed a drop of oil, and it emitted, as it went, a low wailing sound
that seemed to John like a commentary on the whole situation.

VI
Some half a mile from Curzon Street, on the fringe of the Soho
district, there stands a smaller and humbler hotel named the
Belvidere. In a bedroom on the second floor of this, at about the
moment when Pat and Hugo had entered the lobby of the Lincoln,
Dolly Molloy sat before a mirror, cold-creaming her attractive face.
She was interrupted in this task by the arrival of the senatorial
Thomas G.
"Hello, sweetie-pie," said Miss Molloy. "There you are."
"Yes," replied Mr. Molloy. "Here I am."
Although his demeanour lacked the high tragedy which had made
strong men quail in the presence of Pat Wyvern, this man was
plainly ruffled. His fine features were overcast and his frank gray
eyes looked sombre.
"Gee! If there's one thing in this world I hate," he said, "it's having to
talk to policemen."
"What happened?"
"Oh, I gave my name and address. A name and address, that is to
say. But I haven't got over yet the jar it gave me seeing so many
cops all gathered together in a small room. And that's not all," went
on Mr. Molloy, ventilating another grievance. "Why did you make me
tell those folks you were my daughter?"
"Well, sweetie, it sort of cramps my style, having people know we're
married."
"What do you mean, cramps your style?"
"Oh, just cramps my style."
"But, darn it," complained Mr. Molloy, going to the heart of the matter,
"it makes me out so old, folks thinking I'm your father." The rather
pronounced gap in years between himself and his young bride was a
subject on which Soapy Molloy was always inclined to be sensitive.
"I'm only forty-two."
"And you don't seem that, not till you look at you close," said Dolly
with womanly tact. "The whole thing is, sweetie, being so dignified,
you can call yourself anybody's father and get away with it."
Mr. Molloy, somewhat soothed, examined himself, not without
approval, in the mirror.
"I do look dignified," he admitted.
"Like a professor or something."
"That isn't a bald spot coming there, is it?"
"Sure it's not. It's just the way the light falls."
Mr. Molloy resumed his examination with growing content.
"Yes," he said complacently, "that's a face which for business
purposes is a face. I may not be the World's Sweetheart, but nobody
can say I haven't got a map that inspires confidence. I suppose I've
sold more bum oil stock to suckers with it than anyone in the
profession. And that reminds me, honey, what do you think?"
"What?" asked Mrs. Molloy, removing cream with a towel.
"We're sitting in the biggest kind of luck. You know how I've been
wanting all this time to get hold of a really good prospect—some guy
with money to spend who might be interested in a little oil deal? Well,
that Carmody fellow we met to-night has invited us to go and visit at
his country home."
"You don't say!"
"I do say!"
"Well, isn't that the greatest thing. Is he rich?"
"He's got an uncle that must be, or he couldn't be living in a place
like he was telling me. It's one of those stately homes of England you
read about."
Mrs. Molloy mused. The soft smile on her face showed that her day
dreams were pleasant ones.
"I'll have to get me some new frocks ... and hats ... and shoes ... and
stockings ... and ..."
"Now, now, now!" said her husband, with that anxious alarm which
husbands exhibit on these occasions. "Be yourself, baby! You aren't
going to stay at Buckingham Palace."
"But a country-house party with swell people...."
"It isn't a country-house party. There's only the uncle besides those
two boys we met to-night. But I'll tell you what. If I can plant a good
block of those Silver River shares on the old man, you can go
shopping all you want."
"Oh, Soapy! Do you think you can?"
"Do I think I can?" echoed Mr. Molloy scornfully. "I don't say I've ever
sold Central Park or Brooklyn Bridge to anybody, but if I can't get rid
of a parcel of home-made oil stock to a guy that lives in the country
I'm losing my grip and ought to retire. Sure, I'll sell him those Silver
Rivers, honey. These fellows that own these big estates in England
are only glorified farmers when you come right down to it, and a
farmer will buy anything you offer him, just so long as it's nicely
engraved and shines when you slant the light on it."
"But, Soapy...."
"Now what?"
"I've been thinking. Listen, Soapy. A home like this one where we're
going is sure to have all sorts of things in it, isn't it? Pictures, I mean,
and silver and antiques and all like that. Well, why can't we, once
we're in the place, get away with them and make a nice clean-up?"
Mr. Molloy, though conceding that this was the right spirit, was
obliged to discourage his wife's pretty enthusiasm.
"Where could you sell that sort of stuff?"
"Anywhere, once you got it over to the other side. New York's full of
rich millionaires who'll buy anything and ask no questions, just so
long as it's antiques."
Mr. Molloy shook his head.
"Too dangerous, baby. If all that stuff left the house same time as we
did, we'd have the bulls after us in ten minutes. Besides, it's not in
my line. I've got my line, and I like to stick to it. Nobody ever got
anywhere in the long run by going outside of his line."
"Maybe you're right."
"Sure I'm right. A nice conservative business, that's what I aim at."
"But suppose when we get to this joint it looks dead easy?"
"Ah! Well then, I'm not saying. All I'm against is risks. If something's
handed to you on a plate, naturally no one wouldn't ever want to let it
get past them."
And with this eminently sound commercial maxim Mr. Molloy
reached for his pyjamas and prepared for bed. Something
attempted, something done, had earned, he felt, a night's repose.

CHAPTER V

I
Some years before the date of the events narrated in this story, at
the time when there was all that trouble between the aristocratic
householders of Riverside Row and the humbler dwellers in Budd
Street (arising, if you remember, from the practice of the latter of
washing their more intimate articles of underclothing and hanging
them to dry in back gardens into which their exclusive neighbours
were compelled to gaze every time they looked out of windows), the
vicar of the parish, the Rev. Alistair Pond-Pond, always a happy
phrase-maker, wound up his address at the annual village sports of
Rudge with an impressive appeal to the good feeling of those
concerned.
"We must not," said the Reverend Alistair, "consider ourselves as
belonging to this section of Rudge-in-the-Vale or to that section of
Rudge-in-the-Vale. Let us get together. Let us recollect that we are
all fellow-members of one united community. Rudge must be looked
on as a whole. And what a whole it is!"
With the concluding words of this peroration Pat Wyvern, by the time
she had been home a little under a week, found herself in hearty
agreement. Walking with her father along High Street on the sixth
morning, she had to confess herself disappointed with Rudge.
There are times in everyone's experience when Life, after running
merrily for a while through pleasant places, seems suddenly to strike
a dull and depressing patch of road: and this was what was
happening now to Pat. The sense, which had come to her so
strongly in the lobby of the Lincoln Hotel in Curzon Street, of being in
a world unworthy of her—a world cold and unsympathetic and full of
an inferior grade of human being, had deepened. Her home-coming,
she had now definitely decided, was not a success.
Elderly men with a grievance are seldom entertaining companions
for the young, and five days of the undiluted society of Colonel
Wyvern had left Pat with the feeling that, much as she loved her
father, she wished he would sometimes change the subject of his
conversation. Had she been present in person she could not have
had a fuller grasp of the facts of that dynamite outrage than she now
possessed.
But this was not all. After Mr. Carmody's thug-like behaviour on that
fatal day, she was given to understand, the Hall and its grounds were
as much forbidden territory to her as the piazza of the townhouse of
the Capulets would have been to a young Montague. And, though,
being a modern girl, she did not as a rule respond with any great
alacrity to parental mandates, she had her share of clan loyalty and
realized that she must conform to the rules of the game.
Accordingly she had not been within half a mile of the Hall since her
arrival, and, having been accustomed for fourteen years to treat the
place and its grounds as her private property, found Rudge, with a
deadline drawn across the boundaries of Mr. Carmody's park, a poor
sort of place. Unlovable character though Mr. Carmody was in many
respects, she had always been fond of him, and she missed seeing
him. She also missed seeing Hugo. And, as for John, not seeing him
was the heaviest blow of all.
From the days of her childhood, John had always been her stand-by.
Men might come and men might go, but John went on for ever. He
had never been too old, like Mr. Carmody, or too lazy, like Hugo, to
give her all the time and attention she required, and she did think
that, even though there was this absurd feud going on, he might
have had the enterprise to make an opportunity of meeting her. As
day followed day her resentment grew, until now she had reached
the stage when she was telling herself that this was simply what from
a knowledge of his character she might have expected. John—she
had to face it—was a jellyfish. And if a man is a jellyfish, he will
behave like a jellyfish, and it is at times of crisis that his jellyfishiness
will be most noticeable.
It was conscience that had brought Pat to the High Street this
morning. Her father had welcomed her with such a pathetic
eagerness, and had been so plainly pleased to see her back that she
was ashamed of herself for not feeling happier. And it was in a spirit
of remorse that now, though she would have preferred to stay in the
garden with a book, she had come with him to watch him buy
another bottle of Brophy's Paramount Elixir from Chas. Bywater,
Chemist.
Brophy, it should be mentioned, had proved a sensational success.
His Elixir was making the local gnats feel perfect fools. They would
bite Colonel Wyvern on the face and stand back, all ready to laugh,
and he would just smear Brophy on himself and be as good as new.
It was simply sickening, if you were a gnat; but fine, of course, if you
were Colonel Wyvern, and that just man, always ready to give praise
where praise was due, said as much to Chas. Bywater.
"That stuff," said Colonel Wyvern, "is good. I wish I'd heard of it
before. Give me another bottle."
Mr. Bywater was delighted—not merely at this rush of trade, but
because, good kindly soul, he enjoyed ameliorating the lot of others.
"I thought you would find it capital, Colonel. I get a great many
requests for it. I sold a bottle yesterday to Mr. Carmody, senior."
Colonel Wyvern's sunniness vanished as if someone had turned it off
with a tap.
"Don't talk to me about Mr. Carmody," he said gruffly.
"Quite," said Chas. Bywater.
Pat bridged a painful silence.
"Is Mr. Carmody back, then?" she asked. "I heard he was at some
sort of health place."
"Healthward Ho, miss, just outside Lowick."
"He ought to be in prison," said Colonel Wyvern.
Mr. Bywater stopped himself in the nick of time from saying "Quite,"
which would have been a deviation from his firm policy of never
taking sides between customers.
"He returned the day before yesterday, miss, and was immediately
bitten on the nose by a mosquito."
"Thank God!" said Colonel Wyvern.
"But I sold him one of the three-and-sixpenny size of the Elixir," said
Chas. Bywater, with quiet pride, "and a single application completely
eased the pain."
Colonel Wyvern said he was sorry to hear it, and there is no doubt
that conversation would once more have become difficult had there
not at this moment made itself heard from the other side of the door
a loud and penetrating sniff.
A fatherly smile lit up Chas. Bywater's face.
"That's Mr. John's dog," he said, reaching for the cough drops.
Pat opened the door and the statement was proved correct. With a
short wooffle, partly of annoyance at having been kept waiting and
partly of happy anticipation, Emily entered, and seating herself by
the counter, gazed expectantly at the chemist.
"Hullo, Emily," said Pat.
Emily gave her a brief look in which there was no pleased
recognition, but only the annoyance of a dog interrupted during an
important conference. She then returned her gaze to Mr. Bywater.
"What do you say, doggie?" said Mr. Bywater, more paternal than
ever, poising a cough drop.
"Oh, Hell! Snap into it!" replied Emily curtly, impatient at this foolery.
"Hear her speak for it?" said Mr. Bywater. "Almost human, that dog
is."
Colonel Wyvern, whom he had addressed, did not seem to share his
lively satisfaction. He muttered to himself. He regarded Emily sourly,
and his right foot twitched a little.
"Just like a human being, isn't she, miss?" said Chas. Bywater,
damped but persevering.
"Quite," said Pat absently.
Mr. Bywater, startled by this infringement of copyright, dropped the
cough lozenge and Emily snapped it up.
Pat, still distraite, was watching the door. She was surprised to find
that her breath was coming rather quickly and that her heart had
begun to beat with more than its usual rapidity. She was amazed at
herself. Just because John Carroll would shortly appear in that
doorway must she stand fluttering, for all the world as though poor
old Johnnie, an admitted jellyfish, were something that really
mattered? It was too silly, and she tried to bully herself into
composure. She failed. Her heart, she was compelled to realize, was
now simply racing.
A step sounded outside, a shadow fell on the sunlit pavement, and
Dolly Molloy walked into the shop.

II
It is curious, when one reflects, to think how many different
impressions a single individual can make simultaneously on a
number of his or her fellow-creatures. At the present moment it was
almost as though four separate and distinct Dolly Molloys had
entered the establishment of Chas. Bywater.
The Dolly whom Colonel Wyvern beheld was a beautiful woman with
just that hint of diablerie in her bearing which makes elderly
widowers feel that there is life in the old dog yet. Colonel Wyvern
was no longer the dashing Hussar who in the 'nineties had made his
presence felt in many a dim sitting-out place and in many a punt
beneath the willows of the Thames, but there still lingered in him a
trace of the old barrack-room fire. Drawing himself up, he
automatically twirled his moustache. To Colonel Wyvern Dolly
represented Beauty.
To Chas. Bywater, with his more practical and worldly outlook, she
represented Wealth. He saw in Dolly not so much a beautiful woman
as a rich-looking woman. Although Soapy had contrived, with subtle
reasoning, to head her off from the extensive purchases which she
had contemplated making in preparation for her visit to Rudge, Dolly
undoubtedly took the eye. She was, as she would have put it herself,
a snappy dresser, and in Chas. Bywater's mind she awoke roseate
visions of large orders for face creams, imported scents and
expensive bath salts.
Emily, it was evident, regarded Mrs. Molloy as Perfection. A dog
who, as a rule, kept herself to herself and looked on the world with a
cool and rather sardonic eye, she had conceived for Dolly the
moment they met one of those capricious adorations which come
occasionally to the most hard-boiled Welsh terriers. Hastily
swallowing her cough drop, she bounded at Dolly and fawned on
her.
So far, the reactions caused by the newcomer's entrance have been
unmixedly favourable. It is only when we come to Pat that we find
Disapproval rearing its ugly head.
"Disapproval," indeed, is a mild and inadequate word. "Loathing"
would be more correct. Where Colonel Wyvern beheld beauty and
Mr. Bywater opulence, Pat saw only flashiness, vulgarity, and
general horribleness. Piercing with woman's intuitive eye through an
outer crust which to vapid and irreflective males might possibly seem
attractive, she saw Dolly as a vampire and a menace—the sort of
woman who goes about the place ensnaring miserable fat-headed
innocent young men who have lived all their lives in the country and
so lack the experience to see through females of her type.
For beyond a question, felt Pat, this girl must have come to Rudge in
brazen pursuit of poor old Johnnie. The fact that she took her walks
abroad accompanied by Emily showed that she was staying at the
Hall; and what reason could she have had for getting herself invited
to the Hall if not that she wished to continue the acquaintance begun
at the Mustard Spoon? This, then, was the explanation of John's
failure to come and pass the time of day with an old friend. What she
had assumed to be jellyfishiness was in reality base treachery. Like
Emily, whom, slavering over Mrs. Molloy's shoes, she could gladly
have kicked, he had been hypnotized by this woman's specious
glamour and had forsaken old allegiances.
Pat, eyeing Dolly coldly, was filled with a sisterly desire to save John
from one who could never make him happy.
Dolly was all friendliness.
"Why, hello," she said, removing a shapely foot from Emily's mouth,
"I was wondering when I was going to run into you. I heard you lived
in these parts."
"Yes?" said Pat frigidly.
"I'm staying at the Hall."
"Yes?"
"What a wonderful old place it is."
"Yes."
"All those pictures and tapestries and things."
"Yes."
"Is this your father?"
"Yes. This is Miss Molloy, Father. We met in London."
"Pleased to meet you," said Dolly.
"Charmed," said Colonel Wyvern.
He gave another twirl of his moustache. Chas. Bywater hovered
beamingly. Emily, still ecstatic, continued to gnaw one of Dolly's
shoes. The whole spectacle was so utterly revolting that Pat turned
to the door.
"I'll be going along, Father," she said. "I want to buy some stamps."
"I can sell you stamps, miss," said Chas. Bywater affably.
"Thank you, I will go to the post office," said Pat. Her manner
suggested that you got a superior brand of stamps there. She
walked out. Rudge, as she looked upon it, seemed a more
depressing place than ever. Sunshine flooded the High Street.
Sunshine fell on the Carmody Arms, the Village Hall, the Plough and
Chickens, the Bunch of Grapes, the Waggoner's Rest and the
Jubilee Watering Trough. But there was no sunshine in the heart of
Pat Wyvern.

III
And, curiously enough, at this very moment up at the Hall the same
experience was happening to Mr. Lester Carmody. Staring out of his
study window, he gazed upon a world bathed in a golden glow: but
his heart was cold and heavy. He had just had a visit from the Rev.
Alistair Pond-Pond, and the Reverend Alistair had touched him for
five shillings.
Many men in Mr. Carmody's place would have considered that they
had got off lightly. The vicar had come seeking subscriptions to the
Church Organ Fund, the Mothers' Pleasant Sunday Evenings, the
Distressed Cottagers' Aid Society, the Stipend of the Additional
Curate and the Rudge Lads' Annual Summer Outing, and there had
been moments of mad optimism when he had hoped for as much as
a ten-pound note. The actual bag, as he totted it up while riding
pensively away on his motor-bicycle, was the above-mentioned five
shillings and a promise that the squire's nephew Hugo and his friend
Mr. Fish should perform at the village concert next week.
And even so, Mr. Carmody was looking on him as a robber. Five
shillings had gone—just like that—and every moment now he was
expecting his nephew John to walk in and increase his expenditure.
For just after breakfast John had asked if he could have a word with
him later on in the morning, and Mr. Carmody knew what that meant.
John ran the Hall's dairy farm, and he was always coming to Mr.
Carmody for money to buy exotic machinery which could not, the
latter considered, be really necessary. To Mr. Carmody a dairy farm
was a straight issue between man and cow. You backed the cow up
against a wall, secured its milk, and there you were. John always
seemed to want to make the thing so complicated and difficult, and
only the fact that he also made it pay induced his uncle ever to
accede to his monstrous demands.
Nor was this all that was poisoning a perfect summer day for Mr.
Carmody. There was in addition the soul-searing behaviour of Doctor
Alexander Twist, of Healthward Ho.
When Doctor Twist had undertaken the contract of making a new
Lester Carmody out of the old Lester Carmody, he had cannily
stipulated for cash down in advance—this to cover a course of three
weeks. But at the end of the second week Mr. Carmody, learning
from his nephew Hugo that an American millionaire was arriving at
the Hall, had naturally felt compelled to forego the final stages of the
treatment and return home. Equally naturally, he had invited Doctor
Twist to refund one-third of the fee. This the eminent physician and
physical culture expert had resolutely declined to do, and Mr.
Carmody, re-reading the man's letter, thought he had never set eyes
upon a baser document.
He was shuddering at the depths of depravity which it revealed,
when the door opened and John came in. Mr. Carmody beheld him
and shuddered. John—he could tell it by his eye—was planning
another bad dent in the budget.
"Oh, Uncle Lester," said John.
"Well?" said Mr. Carmody hopelessly.
"I think we ought to have some new Alpha Separators."
"What?"
"Alpha Separators."
"Why?"
"We need them."
"Why?"
"The old ones are past their work."
"What," inquired Mr. Carmody, "is an Alpha Separator?"
John said it was an Alpha Separator.
There was a pause. John, who appeared to have something on his
mind these days, stared gloomily at the carpet. Mr. Carmody shifted
in his chair.
"Very well," he said.
"And new tractors," said John. "And we could do with a few
harrows."
"Why do you want harrows?"
"For harrowing."
Even Mr. Carmody, anxious though he was to find flaws in the other's
reasoning, could see that this might well be so. Try harrowing without
harrows, and you are handicapped from the start. But why harrow at
all? That was what seemed to him superfluous and wasteful. Still, he
supposed it was unavoidable. After all, John had been carefully
trained at an agricultural college after leaving Oxford and
presumably knew.
"Very well," he said.
"All right," said John.
He went out, and Mr. Carmody experienced a little relief at the
thought that he had now heard all this morning's bad news.
But dairy farmers have second thoughts. The door opened again.
"I was forgetting," said John, poking his head in.
Mr. Carmody uttered a low moan.
"We want some Thomas tap-cinders."
"Thomas what?"
"Tap-cinders."
"Thomas tap-cinders?"
"Thomas tap-cinders."
Mr. Carmody swallowed unhappily. He knew it was no use asking
what these mysterious implements were, for his nephew would
simply reply that they were Thomas tap-cinders or that they were
something invented by a Mr. Thomas for the purpose of cinder-
tapping, leaving his brain in the same addled condition in which it
was at present. If John wished to tap cinders, he supposed he must
humour him.
"Very well," he said dully.
He held his breath for a few moments after the door had closed once
more, then, gathering at length that the assault on his purse was
over, expelled it in a long sigh and gave himself up to bleak
meditation.