Neo-Orthodox Gadfly

THE LIFE AND OPINIONS OF T. E. HULME (233 pp.)--Alun R. Jones--Beacon Press ($4.50).

When T. E. Hulme died, a friend recalled, "half the women in London went into mourning." Sex was only one of the ardent hobbies pursued by Thomas Ernest Hulme, a brilliant young English intellectual who seemed to take all knowledge for his hobby. When a burst of shellfire killed Hulme on the Western Front in 1917, he was just 34, and had been successively a poet, philosopher, self-proclaimed political reactionary, militarist, and pet lion of his own literary salon. A huge, indolent man of lightning intelligence and wit who combined a Prussian officer's bearing with a contagious charm, Hulme was perhaps best described by his sculptor friend Jacob Epstein when he wrote: "He was capable of kicking a theory as well as a man downstairs."

It was his theory-kicking that made him a figure with impact. Still relatively unknown, he basks in the shadows of the men he influenced: T. S. Eliot, Yeats, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Epstein, et al. In a model of graciously written, cleanly organized scholarship, Hull University Lecturer Alun R. Jones has produced a definitive critical biography that places Hulme where he belongs, as one of the shapers of 20th century consciousness.

Tilting with Bobbies. By English standards, Hulme was a hick. He came from a Staffordshire farm family, though his father relished playing the Victorian county squire. Hulme affected to despise the Establishment though he adopted its manner. Once, when a policeman objected to his making water in a Soho Square gutter, Hulme haughtily asked: "Do you know you are addressing a member of the middle classes?" The bobby apologized.

Another tilt with the law proved more serious. Hulme was sent down from Cambridge for punching a policeman. He left town astride a coffin in an undergraduate mock funeral. Disowned by his family, he spent eight months roughing it across Canada. The vast sky and the flat horizon-reaching grasslands left him with a numbing sense of oppression, "the fright of the mind before the unknown" that he came to believe "created not only the first gods, but also the first art."

The first art Hulme created when he returned to London in 1908, at the age of 25, was imagist poetry. Hulme preached the primacy of the image, since he believed that man's only sure grasp of reality was through analogy and metaphor. Though his disciple Ezra Pound gave the school its name and became its chief panjandrum, it was Hulme who wrote the first imagist verse, including what T. S. Eliot has called "two or three of the most beautiful short poems in the language." Sample:

A touch of cold in the Autumn night

I walked abroad,

And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge

Like a red-faced farmer.

I did not stop to speak, but nodded;

And round about were the wistful stars

With white faces like town children.

Spilt Religion. Soon tiring of poetry, Hulme launched a Tuesday night salon at the home of his mistress, where he propounded to "journalists, painters, Irish yaps, American bums" the ideas that would later be posthumously published under the apt title, Speculations. Every civilization, Hulme held, was based on certain assumptions about the nature of man. Modern civilization, he argued, was grounded on Renaissance humanism, with its assumption of man's innate perfectibility. This optimistic view had been compounded by the 19th century's evolutionary belief in cultural continuity and the idea of progress. To this, Hulme opposed the doctrine of original sin and the idea that man's nature is fixed, constant and imperfectible.

This attack on 19th century optimism sounds familiar today, but it was still revolutionary in Hulme's time. He enrolled the contending doctrines under the party labels of Romanticism and Classicism and offered definitions of each which rank as classic. The romantic view is "that man is intrinsically good, spoilt by circumstances"; the classical "that he is intrinsically limited, but disciplined by order and tradition to something fairly decent. To one party man's nature is like a well, to the other like a bucket." To Hulme, romanticism was "spilt religion": "You don't believe in God, so you begin to believe that man is a god; you don't believe in Heaven, so you begin to believe in heaven on earth." Hulme insisted that the logical extension of romanticism in politics was the idea of liberal progressive democracy. Politically, classicism called for order, tradition and authority. Hulme agreed with Aristotle that "only a god or a beast could live outside the State."

What he failed to see was that only slaves could live inside the authoritarian superstate. To Hulme, as Biographer Jones rightly notes, must go some of the ideological responsibility for the fact that his friend, the Spanish diplomat Ramiro de Maetzu, died fighting for Franco, that Pound embraced Mussolini, that Wyndham Lewis touted Hitler, and that Eliot's Idea of a Christian Society is a rigidly hierarchical blueprint for what his mentor called "the constant society." On the plus side, Hulme helped make neo-orthodoxy respectable, modern art approachable, and cyclical philosophies of history acceptable.

On the Cuff. For ill or good, Hulme would not have exercised such a magnetic pull over friend and foe if his life had not been as unconventional as his mind. He rarely rose before noon, loved nothing better than to read Kant stretched out in a hot tub, and could not resist marching in Salvation Army parades. He argued that woman's place was in the home, but he was forever picking one up on the streets, and one memorably uncomfortable escapade took place on the steel staircase of the emergency exit at the Picadilly Circus tube station.

When Wyndham Lewis' girl friend left him to become Hulme's fiancee, Lewis tracked his rival down and grabbed Hulme by the throat. Hulme picked Lewis up bodily, marched out to Soho Square and hung Lewis upside down on an iron railing by his trouser cuffs. In a graphic, impromptu way, the episode symbolized what one neo-orthodox nonconformist had done to his generation.

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