Vico, Virginia Woolf and Adrian Stokes's Autobiographies: Fantasy, Providence and Isolation in Post‐War British Aesthetics
2012; Oxford University Press; Volume: 35; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/j.1467-8365.2012.00916.x
ISSN1467-8365
Autores Tópico(s)Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism
ResumoDetail of a photograph in Adrian Stokes, Smooth and Rough, London, 1951 (plate 3). This article investigates how Adrian Stokes's aesthetic writing changed in response to the pressures and opportunities of post-war Reconstruction and the calls for social pertinence in cultural work at that time. His autobiographies Inside Out: An Essay in the Psychology and Aesthetic Appeal of Space and Smooth and Rough (1947 and 1951) mark the great transition in his aesthetic writings, from the carving and modelling ethos of the Renaissance and ballet books (1932–49) to the psychoanalytical opposition between the depressive and schizoid-paranoid positions of the later books (1955–72) as they move increasingly towards an engagement with contemporary life. Having made his mark as an innovative critic of Renaissance art and of the contemporary Hampstead artists Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and Henry Moore, Stokes withdrew to market gardening in Cornwall during and after the Second World War, partly to escape the backbiting of the London intelligentsia but also to issue a rallying cry for an aesthetic outlook based on organic community directed against other contemporary conceptions of cultural life that he criticizes in his letters to Herbert Read and Geoffrey Gorer at this time. With the advent of the social consensus of the Welfare State in 1947 he felt pressure from the criticism of these correspondents to form a social vision and public application for his growing commitment to psychoanalytical theories about the development of the infant's psyche promoted in the books and essays of Melanie Klein, from whom he had received six years’ almost daily analysis during the 1930s. The socialist accuses the psychologist of caving in to the status quo, trying to adapt the neurotic to the system, thus depriving him of a potential revolutionary: the psychologist retorts that the socialist is trying to lift himself by his own boot tags, that he fails to understand himself, or the fact that lust for money is only one form of the lust for power, and so that after he has won his power by revolution he will recreate the same conditions. Both are right. As long as civilization remains as it is, the number of patients the psychologist can cure are very few, and as soon as socialism attains power, it must learn to direct its own interior energy and will need the psychologist.3 Despite some angry asides to Read about Auden's cultural leadership where psychoanalysis was concerned, Stokes nevertheless seemed to heed that final point: ‘I think analysis will be speeded up eventually – and remain Freudian.’4 In the mood of Reconstruction following the war, Stokes felt the need to find wider cultural applications for the organic mythology that characterized his pre-war books. He was now fearful of, and wished to disassociate himself from, the reactionary implications of his earlier collaboration with the American poet Ezra Pound who, in the vivid Mediterranean imagery of his long experimental poem The Cantos, had symbolized the Renaissance tyrant Sigismondo della Malatesta as a positive precursor of Mussolini. Nevertheless, Stokes retained from Stones of Rimini (1934) the mythology of limestone he had shared with Pound, so it is no coincidence that in 1946 sections of Inside Out were first published in Horizon, a journal whose editor Cyril Connolly habitually railed against modern society's lack of a ‘prevailing myth’.5 The aesthetic values of a frugal life in an organic society was an ideal that Stokes had also shared with the painter Graham Bell, who had written about it nostalgically around 1939 when Stokes was moving to Cornwall: ‘When I read your letter I think of your limestone, and the ecstatic feelings had when finding myself in the South of France, I first fell in sympathy with you. Things like wine and olives, the symbols of a frugal creative life.’6 We shall see that Stokes provided a psychoanalytic foundation for this ideology in Inside Out, where he opposed it to what he calls the ‘new religions, chiefly political’ that ‘flourish on every side’.7 I shall examine the post-war circumstances of the new approach to culture Stokes envisaged when writing to Gorer of his works of this time that they represented ‘a new humanism as well as a novel form of autobiography’.8 How was it new? There was little new about the title of Inside Out, which may have been a publisher's ploy to harvest the continuing currency of a two-volume anthology edited by Stuart Bates in 1936 and 1937 called Inside Out: An Introduction to Autobiography. But Stokes's Inside Out courts the conventional associations of autobiography the better to defeat them, and no more so than in relation to Herbert Read's autobiography Annals of Innocence and Experience (1940). In a remarkable letter from which I will quote more fully later, Stokes pays Read a superficial compliment: ‘Your own autobiography which I deeply admire must have been a model to me in many respects’, but he goes on to differentiate it from the structure of Smooth and Rough rather sharply. Stokes's own ‘generalizations . . . are . . . implicit in the homely first part . . . Nothing is introduced later that is not in everyday terms in the earlier part . . .’9 Stokes expressed considerable respect for the great talents of his old friend, but his compliment makes sense only if Read's Annals is interpreted as a counter-influence, for as autobiography it does the opposite. The son of a Yorkshire farmer, Read paints the picture of an innocent childhood free from pity and terror in an idyllic countryside presided over by the massive and benign presences of Mother and Father (whereas in Inside Out the influence of Stokes's parents is felt only obliquely in the physical surroundings). In Read's Annals the romantic nostalgia for early innocence that is usual in autobiographical literature gives way at adolescence to a racier, more circumstantial narrative of events in which awareness of books, social class, hierarchies of employment, educational achievements and experience of war are enumerated in a style that Read admits is ‘trivial and personal’,10 for which he promises compensation in ‘some moral generalizations external to the narrative’, by which he means the weighty matters of his personal credo about art, life and religion.11 The title's allusion to Blake's Poems of Innocence and Experience suggests that childhood is a quarantined state that conducts to adulthood a credo based on innocence uncorrupted by adult experience. ‘The perturbations of the intellect are a danger to the instinctive basis of life; no wonder, then, that nature is wise enough to wrap us in a cocoon of insensibility, until such time as we have the power to counter intelligence with deeper intuition.’12 For Stokes, by contrast, childhood experience does not stand aloof from adult consciousness, but saturates it with sensory, sexual and especially visual resonance, at every point. The autobiographies extend this ‘organic’ psychoanalytic inheritance from childhood by an analogous twinning of past and present personal images with those of prior authors. This is to build a resonating structure of allusion that cuts across the genres of autobiography, art criticism and the novel. It is an innovative combination of literary genres that dramatizes shifts between different modes of consciousness so as to raise personal themes into a resonant public myth of wide cultural significance that the author hopes others will recognize from their own experience. Since the hybridized form of the autobiographies is integral to their message of psychical and social integration, I shall address its complex structure, immediate origins and longer history. Both of Stokes's autobiographies are composed of larger and smaller sets of binary oppositions. Inside Out consists of two parallel parts each of which has an internal opposition. Part one consists in the contrast between the psychical misery of an Edwardian upbringing near Hyde Park in London and the integration arising from the discovery of aesthetic experience in Italy. Part two traces the emergence of steady order in the mature paintings of Cézanne from the turmoil of his early works. The transformation of Stokes as English aesthete parallels the transformation of the French artist, while the stability they respectively achieve in their life and art is presented as potentially available to everyone. The sources of these dualisms explain the authority they were meant to carry. We must consider old sources before we can understand the radically new intervention made by Stokes's opposite uses of the writings of Virginia Woolf and Giambattista Vico. Pan-European in scope, the paradigm is structured by a discourse of cultural self-representation oriented on the north/south axis that was continuously shaken for over two millennia by the collision and interpenetration of Teutonic with Latin cultures. This discourse has historiographical and not merely historical continuity: it is a dialogical history of representation whose originary moment was Tacitus's ambivalent comparison of German and Roman societies in his Germania.13 These ‘terms “functioned … as floating signifiers … that remained opposed to one another though their specific references repeatedly changed” … according to time, place, and circumstance.’14 Perhaps part of Stokes's strategy in restoring this well-worn topos of North versus South to use after it had been so vehemently challenged by the war-time allegiance of Germany and Italy was the familiar one of reimagining culture with the remnants of a previous age, so that, instead of warring European states alongside an economically rising America, the classical idea of Europe could live on as an ‘aesthetic category’, symbolic of cultural value.15 But another reason for Stokes's perpetuation of the North–South dichotomy was to ground its signifiers within specific references that highlight difference between pre- and post-war understandings of Imperialism itself. In the context of post-war European austerity there seemed less to choose between British imperial excess in the Victorian and Edwardian eras and the excesses of Hitler and Mussolini during the recent war. The Hyde Park of Stokes's childhood allowed him to probe the impulses that lay behind the mechanized greed of all imperial expansionism, a point he makes with a vivid image that associates Hitler's values with the microphone through which he ranted: ‘The microphone and the voice of Hitler, the demoniac romantic puppet, were one.’ (II, 256) The most direct source of dualism in Stokes's autobiographies, however, is the psychoanalytic theories of reparation in the writings of his analyst, Melanie Klein. ‘Of course it is basic human relationship, above all that my two landscapes describe. Hyde Park is especially a destroyed and contaminated mother, Italy the rapid attempt to restore. In their terms . . . alone, could I re-create succinctly . . . the incorporation of opposites.’ (2, 158) Fifteen years before Inside Out was published it is eerie to discover this very opposition between ‘a dark, lifeless and ruined’ native town and what Klein calls ‘an imaginary city full of life, light and beauty’ in Melanie Klein's case history of Stokes that was inadequately disguised, as it now appears, in The Psycho-Analysis of Children (1932).16 and the untorn shells are lying thick upon the sand, and the tops of the rocks, to which the waves never rise, are green with grass, grown fine as hair. It is the landscape, not of dreams or of fancy, but of places far withdrawn, and hours selected from a thousand with a miracle of finesse. Through Leonardo's strange veil of sight things reach him so; in no ordinary night or day, but as in faint light of eclipse, or in some brief interval of falling rain at daybreak, or through deep water.18 served as a kind of watchful coasting on the fringes of consciousness at times, also as vehicles which carried correspondence to the deeper depths of the mind, bringing thence the matter for new affinities. And yet this upward, as it were, and downward movement was expressed by a steady low-lying motion along a flat surface. (I, 147) The disconnection between the picture surface on which the long dead artist scored his patterns and the depths of memory that reach the viewer through Leonardo's veil of sight are homologous with the deflection of the young voyeur's attention away from the unfamiliar girls to the horizontal flow of traffic on the park's horizon. We learn from Klein's case history of Stokes that traffic stands for sadistic phantasies of parental intercourse, and that if he had had sisters (instead of these doll-like companions) he would have been less terrified of female interiors.19 Stokes is careful to provide only the feel of this clinical material, not its explicit interpretation. Translated into the urban landscape, he employs Pater's imagery to evoke the park as a malign and repressive internal landscape. ‘His ego’, Klein had written, ‘had … been enabled to repress his sadistic impulses violently … so that these could not get into sufficient contact with his real objects and remained for the most part … attached to his phantastic imagos.’20 Despite ‘pleasure . . . when the outward world at large, takes for us the form of the jagged, shifting promontories of the mind’ (I, 147), Stokes affirms that this urban Outside-In is morbidly oppressive. After seeking this and that while your experience along calli and of twists of canal and bridge was punctuated by the resounding circus of successive campi where full light showered down, you emerge as from a minotaur's labyrinth on to the vast piazza and the pinkish piazetta that stops the sea and sky. You have emerged into a world of space where the rigmarole you carry from the calli is now before you, not behind the eyes but before you, superb, immaculate. (I, 39–40) In Stones of Venice Ruskin had brought his reader towards San Marco square through a crowded and cacophonous alley where imagery of poverty and greed culminated in the regular wine-shop near the ‘mouth’ of the square, where the Catholic Madonna is flanked by ‘goodly ranks of bottles’ for the gondoliers to squander their earnings in drunkenness.21 Like some claustrophobic womb or alimentary canal, Stokes finds the equivalent of this alley in the ‘dirty echoing tunnel’ beneath the Serpentine Bridge in Hyde Park (plate 1) in which ‘a dog would be barking like Cerberus’. It is the ‘obscene hole’ to which the young Stokes ‘attributed the home of the animus that tore the body of the park to shreds’ (II, 152–3). After attaining ‘the Bocca di Piazza (the mouth of the Square)’,22 Ruskin released his reader from the oppressive non-visual memories of the alley into a vision of San Marco Square ‘as if the rugged and irregular houses that pressed together above us in the dark alley had been struck back into sudden obedience and lovely order’.23 Likewise in Inside Out, disappearance into the ‘obscene hole’ beneath the Serpentine bridge transforms into an experience of emergence from the Mont Cenis tunnel on his first voyage to ‘the counter-landscape’ of Italy (II, 153). It is a process marked, however, by smooth and exhilarating transition instead of smarting, violent denial: ‘It seemed that for the first time things were happening entirely outside me.’ (II, 157) He opposes rebirth into a new phase of existence that embraces the whole of Italy to Ruskin's narrow denial of sensuous memory on emerging into a single piazza. And whereas Ruskin would later oppose the idle greed of Venetian beggars and urchins infesting the piazza with the moral and economic order of an English cathedral town society, Stokes combines them in bad memories of Hyde Park. Thus Ruskin's ‘rigid divisions of smooth grass and gravel walk’24 in the precincts of the English cathedral are transmuted into cruel segregations of the destitute within Hyde Park: ‘whatever was railed within the park, suggested a burning-cold, a searing prohibition against those who would slink away into the iron ivyness of copse or plantation’ (II, 142). Ruskin's attention to ‘the sentence of warning, – Christ shall come’25 inscribed on the statuary of St Mark's becomes the superintending park-keepers, policemen and governesses in Inside Out, whose punitive voyeurism is somehow cognate with the crimes they punish. The environment is also permeated with the associations of the wider workings of empire. ‘My suffering was at least magnified by the Edwardian centre of Empire’ (II, 149). Omnipotent thinking has destroyed harmonious interaction between mental and materialist economies. Having adduced Herbert Read, Tacitus, Klein, Ruskin and Pater as Stokes's sources for the autobiographies, I turn now to the new dimension in Stokes's intertextual strategies. If Paterian internalization and Ruskinian externalization correspond to the salient opposition between modelling and carving in Stokes's earlier Renaissance aesthetic, the autobiographies complicate that opposition by playing variations on the experiential, inter-subjective rhythms of the modern novel. In the 1920s Stokes had written hyperbolically to Edward Sackville-West about ‘those bloody Bloomsburys who are, at the best, and it's nice of me to say so, feckless hyenas’, adding in a postscript: ‘I admit Virginia Woolf is real genius, and any rate “To the Lighthouse” is.’26 Inside Out and To the Lighthouse (1927) were both written within sight of Godrevy lighthouse off St Ives, and both use reading to visualize the turning of experience into art – Cézanne's in Stokes's case and the artist character Lily Briscoe's in Woolf's. Both books mount closely related critiques of omnipotent thinking in contrast to art making. Taking a commentary of Kant's Critique on mountain walks, the adolescent Stokes had ‘had the makings of a true and terrible fanatic for whom a single string of argument could trap the whole universe . . . every secret . . . was contained for me on the walls of a big bookshop’ (II, 151). His inexorable epistemophilia has much in common with Woolf's portrait of the workaholic, professorial Mr Ramsay whom Lily Briscoe concedes has ‘a splendid mind. For if thought is like a keyboard of a piano, divided into so many notes, or like the alphabet is ranged in twenty-six letters all in order . . . He reached Q. Very few people in the whole of England ever reach Q.’27 At the end of the novel Lily Briscoe resolves the rhythmic balance between two contending masses in her painting with a single line. Its meaning is to reconcile the masculine intellectuality of Mr Ramsay with the feminine empathy of his wife. In this light it is interesting to consider an anecdote Lawrence Gowing contributed to a composite memoire of Stokes in The Listener of 1973 from their time at the Euston Road School of painting in the late 1930s: I realized that ‘composition’ was associated with the kind of differentiation through complementary colours and contrasts of Bloomsbury painting, and with the post-Impressionist style of rather pretentious, deliberate, pictorial architecture, which for Adrian was the very antithesis of what he understood the architectural analogy of painting to be. … I remember painting at the easel next to him when the class was being taught by Vanessa Bell, who customarily went from easel to easel, correcting the students’ pictures. When she got to Adrian I heard her say, ‘I think that's in the right place and I think that's in the right place’, and Adrian burst in: ‘Why do you want to put a cobalt blue line around it then?’28 The anecdote reveals that Stokes objected to the tendency of Bloomsbury formalism to quarantine organic form and colour from each other and to abstract from the capacity of naturalistic art to attain a wider and deeper emotional integration. But he maintained that such integration should be more than subjective. So she always saw, when she thought of Mr Ramsay's work, a scrubbed kitchen table. It lodged now in the fork of a pear tree, for they had reached the orchard. And with painful effort of concentration, she focused her mind, not upon the silver-bossed bark of the tree, or upon its fish-shaped leaves, but upon a phantom kitchen table, one of those scrubbed board tables, grained and knotted, whose virtue seems to have been laid bare by years of muscular integrity, which stuck there, its four legs in air. Naturally, if one's days were passed in this seeing of angular essences, the reducing of lovely evenings, with all their flamingo clouds and blue and silver to a white deal four-legged table (and it was a mark of the finest minds so to do), naturally one could not be judged like an ordinary person.29 In her empathic effort to understand this notion, Lily inexorably turns the image from Berkeley's bleakly philosophical consideration of a table in absentia into something redolent both of the maternal labour of scrubbing and of an inspired capacity for aesthetic distillation whose value she woefully underestimates in herself. Liberated from Mr Ramsay's mind, the table swerves through the consciousness of his son into Lily's imagination where it is incongruously lodged in the fork of a tree against the evening sky with its legs in the air in an attitude that quirkily recalls Ruskin's satire of King's College chapel ‘with pinnacles at the corners . . . looking like tables upside down, with their four legs in the air!’30 It is a scrubbed, sturdy, deal kitchen table, very bright: the fact that it is solid, that it stands on the floor is beautiful. The mensa table – or rather, a nexus of such experience, since it is most unlikely to have been in isolation – was a revolution in my life, an image the ‘feel’ of which corresponds with an adult image of a simple table prepared for an al fresco meal, the family mid-day meal under a fig tree, with a fiasco of wine on the table, olives, a cheese and bread. With one word I possessed in embryo the Virgilian scene; a robust and gracious mother earth. (II, 153–4) As Stokes wrote to Herbert Read: ‘Thinking, logic etc. also has its unconscious contexts. Even the learning of Latin can be an experience of the whole personality.’31 Displaced though Lily Briscoe's table is to Italy, Stokes has taken it down from the tree and planted it firmly on the ground. His table, too, is ‘scrubbed’ and ‘sturdy’, but rather than a ‘phantom’ of individualist, plastic imagination, it is involuntarily discovered as something external to the personal self, concatenated with other memories into an ‘adult image’ of social congregation, enfolded in traditional Mediterranean custom.32 Woolf enlarged Paterian rhythm to liberate the table from Mr Ramsay's clinical intellect. In restoring domestic normality to Lily's precarious fantasy, Stokes purges her swerving imagination of weirdness and idiosyncrasy to stabilize it in the family setting of a midday meal. Stokes had attacked ‘the vehicles of Time itself’ in Hyde Park under the image of Renault cars with blinded eyes, by comparison with which ‘Vision, as well as Design, lay in the effortless sky alone.’ (II, 151) The clear target is Roger Fry's Vision and Design. Are these obvious attacks on time-bound, rhythmical, formalist transcendence anything more than conservative, perhaps even sexist, reactions against progressive Bloomsbury aesthetics? What is the rationale of Stokes's post-war call to order? the sky fearfully rolled with thunder and flashed with lightning … a few giants … were frightened and astonished by the great effect whose cause they did not know, and raised their eyes and became aware of the sky. … And because … the nature of the human mind leads it to attribute its own nature to the effect … they pictured the sky to themselves as a great animated body, which in that aspect they called Jove, the first god … who by the whistling of his bolts and the noise of his thunder was attempting to tell them something. And thus they began to exercise that natural curiosity which is the daughter of ignorance and the mother of knowledge, and which, opening the mind of man, gives birth to wonder…34 The New Science appears on a list of books that Stokes intended to take with him to Italy in 1930.35 Vico explicitly distinguishes such spontaneous, poetic imagery from the philosophical abstractions of a later, decadent age. In the opening passage of Inside Out the poetic metaphor of the sky as ‘a great animated body’ appears to lend mythic weight to a Kleinian conception of the Park as an imago of the maternal body.36 Vico frames this legend of human fright at a sudden transformation in the skies as an event that compelled the invention of the word Jove and the impulse of human sheltering and settlement in caves that led to the formation of families. My own room at the sea end of the house, half outside our garden boundary, looked on to the torsos of many trees sapient . . . I had first glanced up at the house from the side-lane, below what was to be my room. I had experienced a quick hallucination – a picture without figures as I gazed at a central slatted feature roofed with copper, carrying the weather vane – a sensation of small statue and the droning cries of children issuing like bees from this white granite hive. Later, we bought the house. My wife gave birth there to our son. (II, 218) These prophetic images chime in with Vico's conception of a universale fantastico or ‘imaginative universal’, fantasies that form the basis of the sensus communis. This is the sense common to all mankind that registers and unfolds in human language and institutions. Lily Briscoe's highly individuated and interiorized fantasy of the table is as unlike Vico's ‘imaginative universal’ as it is possible to be, for it does not respond to what Stokes calls in Inside Out ‘the low hum of insistence recorded in turns of speech, in gesture, even, in all folklore, in all language’ (1, 159). This is the substratum of shared, ordinary experience that may be why Stokes illustrates the architectural thesis of Smooth and Rough with vernacular Swiss architecture (plate 3) as well as famously distinguished buildings such as Bramante's Tempietto or Palladio's Il Redentore. Stokes's sense of the customary, familial relations embedded in the Latin word for table corresponds with Vico's interest in language as the repository of habitual group experience. This is his philological genius for casting ‘flashes of light into the aboriginal shadows of the past in passages of compelling empathy and piercing generalization’.37 What Osbert Sitwell called Stokes's ‘unique talent … for the discovery of the obvious’38 corresponds with Hans Georg Gadamer's definition of ‘this general sense of the true and the right, which . . . enables one to discover what is obvious [on which] Vico bases the significance . . . of rhetoric.’39 For Vico the Providence encapsulated in imaginative universals and sensus communis is the cause of that aspect of cultural history that cannot be explained merely as the result of conscious action. For Stokes the analogy between Vico's New Science and psychoanalysis is that the meaning of experience can only be established in retrospect. To quote more fully from the remarkable letter to Herbert Read about the structure of Smooth and Rough, Stokes projects a Viconian type of social psychology whose terms form a microcosm of the macrocosm of Vico's ideal eternal history. The context of the letter shows how the purely personal content of the autobiographies is ‘worked through’ into the wider embrace of collective experience. Like Vico in his autobiography, the ‘section which represents the analyst’ is written with the strange detachment of the third person: ‘Our friend prefers to describe broad landscapes …’ (II, 234). Like Vico's ‘new scientists’ also, this psychoanalytic voice searches the workings of Providence at work in the rapacious industrial scene for the causes of what is too strange and immoderate to find an echo in the accumulated sensibility of individual egos. The psychoanalytically informed cultural observer in the autobiographies poses the question: ‘How far is the external world today outside due correspondence with the inner world, and if it is, what is the cause?’ (II, 167). Like Vico, Stokes objects to the reduction of particularity to universals, a vice he associates with Bloomsbury aesthetics and exclusively philosophical perspectives. Though his fantasies are volcanic, they are illuminated by contrasts with matter-of-fact experiences. He associates this outlook with resistance to totalitarian politics. In resisting ‘infantile omnipotence of thinking’ in Smooth and Rough (II, 226), for example, he opposes the workings of empire and the psyche as economies that work in contrary directions: ‘now that since the war Victorian squalor and splendour are numbered, finite, I imagine that it has not only been a vast shock but for many a psychological relief to discover dramatically there is a decided limit to our national wealth’ (II, 226). Against those megalomaniac impulses he advocates the psychological wisdom of acknowledging the workings of an interior empire within the unconscious where ‘the distant and original rough homes of all men's feelings never fail to send their messages, garbled, and even sometimes reversed in transit, and to exert their power upon the palatial colonies.’ (II, 237) The grandiose impulses of nationalistic empire building are traced back to their humble home in the common individual psyche. Instead of visualizing conscious life (forgetting the to-and-fro of memory) to be a thin, ramshackle deck (removable in one piece), planted on top of romantic wildness in the holds, having some knowledge of the ingenious poetry of the ways and means, we shall marvel at and revere a huge structure above ground, storey upon storey of amplification, of development, of re
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