Jonathan Bowden’s The Cultured Thug

You can pre-order Jonathan Bowden’s collection The Cultured Thug here.

2,507 words

Jonathan Bowden (ed. by Greg Johnson)
The Cultured Thug
San Francisco: Counter-Currents Publishing, 2023

Stylistically there are two kinds of Jonathan Bowden essay. There are the neat, trim, polished ones that clock in at 800 to 1,100 words, like a review in The Spectator. Then there are the luxuriant, digressive ones that are always rambling off onto weird, and often interesting, tangents. The difference between the two is that the latter kind usually come to us as transcripts of speeches from gatherings where Bowden had an hour or more to fill, and thus had good reason to pad out his thesis with amusing asides and intriguing anecdotes. Drawing on his own capacious memory, he sometimes misremembered when he went off on these ex tempore tangents. But the errors are usually innocuous and fun to catch.

A good example of Bowden’s digressive style is his nearly 10,000-word tribute to his subversive writer friend Bill Hopkins (“Bill Hopkins: An Anti-Humanist Life,” collected in 2014’s Western Civilization Bites Back from Counter-Currents; recording and transcript online here). Bowden really goes to town here with snarky descriptions of the Angry Young Men of the 1950s, thereby putting Hopkins, Colin Wilson, and their friends and enemies in context.

One of those innocuous/fun errors comes when he describes the early-1950s meeting between Colin Wilson and novelist Angus Wilson (no relation), who was then employed as a librarian, ruling the big, round dais in the center of the old Reading Room at the British Museum.[1] Angus sees Colin beavering away in the Reading Room every day, and finally asks him what he’s working on. Colin lets Angus see part of the manuscript. In Bowden’s telling, Colin’s sheaf of pages will soon emerge as The Outsider, thereby guaranteeing him eternal fame, if not fortune. It all makes for a compelling story, only: a) the manuscript was actually a novel, published much later as Ritual in the Dark; b) Colin wouldn’t begin to write The Outsider for another couple of years; and finally, c) Colin didn’t much care for Angus Wilson as a novelist, and in fact thought he was a clumsy writer.[2]

You can buy Jonathan Bowden’s Western Civilization Bites Back here.

In this new collection of Bowden essays, The Cultured Thug, we find an even longer and more boisterous treatment of another of his favorite subjects, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which he juxtaposes with tales from twentieth-century Soviet-style terror regimes. Like the essay I just described, this 11,000-word opus is really an edited transcript of a speech he gave at a New Right meeting in London (audio and transcript online here).

In the new collection it is titled “Nineteen Eighty-Four and Totalitarian Leftism,” which neatly captures the topics he’s going to grapple with. Bowden swings back and from talking about his favorite parts of the Orwell book (which he often paraphrases or slightly misremembers) to describing how this or that theme was exemplified in real life by gruesome episodes and personalities in the Soviet Union, or Poland, or East Germany, or some other Communist satrapy. He also brings in some amusing anecdotes from his own life, such as the time he played the character O’Brien in a theatrical version at his Catholic secondary school:

When I was eighteen we had a school play, and it was quite interesting. There was a very bad actor called — someone I won’t name — whose surname was Smith, who played Winston Smith. And I played O’Brien dressed all in black, and we didn’t have any girls in the school so we had one homosexual in the sixth form dressed up as a girl who played Julia. And there’s this strange moment, because this is an all boys’ school, and all the Catholic brothers are down there, and it’s all very odd. I’m one of the few Protestants there, there’s a transvestite on the stage and a bloke who can’t act and we’re playing Nineteen Eighty-Four; it’s typical. And when Julia comes on there’s this great wolf-whistle that then dies in its own throes, do you know what I mean, when they all realize, “Good Lord, it’s so-and-so dressed up!”

Truly, a formative experience for Bowden. He wrote on Nineteen Eighty-Four several times, and even in the short pieces he makes some comment about how O’Brien is a priestly figure because he wears the all-black uniform of the Inner Party. Bowden also has a hobbyhorse about how O’Brien has an Irish name because of Orwell’s anti-Catholic bias. This is really a stretch, I think; Orwell’s oldest friend and his first wife were named Cyril Connolly and Eileen O’Shaughnessy, and neither was Catholic.[3] Bowden is obsessed with O’Brien because, well, in his last year of secondary school, he was O’Brien!

Some of Bowden’s other flubs and fluffs are funny, if never quite as hilarious as his real-life reminiscence of that high-school theater performance, with the “homosexual in the sixth form” who played Julia. (Presumably wearing the same sort of unisex denim overalls that Winston and all the others in the Outer Party wore. So not much room for cross-dressing there.)

At the beginning of his talk, he tells us that Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four on the island of Jura (true) in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland, where he lived in a tent. What? A tent? Absolutely not true. Orwell dwelt, and wrote — reviews, a memoir, and his work-in-progress novel — in an ample old farmhouse on Jura called Barnhill. He had been pointed to this isolated dwelling by his friend and patron David Astor, editor of The Observer and son of MP Nancy Astor. Astor happened to own property on Jura, and was able to find Orwell a retreat when he wanted one.

In a fantastical mix-up, Bowden says that Orwell went to Jura in 1947 because it was recommended to him as a retreat by a friend and patron who published The Adelphi, a literary magazine. Well, that patron-publisher would be Richard Rees, who published some of Orwell’s best early essays in The Adelphi in the 1930s. But he didn’t own property on Jura, and hadn’t done much for Orwell since — except, perhaps, provide a bit of backstory to Nineteen Eighty-Four. Rees was the model for the generous publisher, Ravelston, in Orwell’s novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying: the wealthy, upper-class patron of penniless poet Gordon Comstock. He bails Comstock out of jail after a drunken spree and tells him to get his life in order.

This episode is partly mimicked in Nineteen Eighty-Four, except that the new version of Ravelston, O’Brien, “rescues” Winston from jail only to take him to a torture chamber in the Ministry of Love, instead of Rees’ luxurious home near Regent’s Park.[4]

As this new collection, The Cultured Thug, is a variegated assortment of columns and speeches, its selections probably should be read out of order. Just pick the first one with a title you like, and move on from there. I first noticed this vast Nineteen Eighty-Four thing, which I had explored before. Then I went to Bowden’s review of Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ. This was a succès de scandale in 2004, and a big money-spinner, too, despite — or because of — the efforts of various international Jewish groups to shut it down. As Bowden points out, those loud screams against Gibson for some anti-Jewish remarks, and his audacity to depict of the death of Jesus as it is told in the Gospel of St. Mark, had the unintended effect of boosting awareness and ticket sales. So the harassment campaign eventually quieted down.

Nevertheless, Bowden writes, “The film is not in the least anti-Semitic. . . . It is definitely not philo-Semitic, however.” On the other hand, it seems to like the Romans, who — or so we’ve been repeatedly instructed in recent decades — were the real murderers of Christ:

This fits in with a very benevolent of the Romans throughout the film… The Bulgarian actor playing Pilate (who bears a striking resemblance to Mussolini) depicts him, in Nietzsche’s words, as the real hero of the New Testament.

You can buy Jonathan Bowden’s Extremists: Studies in Metapolitics here.

I really hoped to enjoy “George Steiner’s The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H.,” a review of a drama adapted from Steiner’s novella about the entrapment and trial of an elderly Adolf Hitler found in South America. But I couldn’t really get into it. Bowden makes one arguable point, which is that disaffected intellectual Jews such as Steiner have a natural attraction to the Führer, a fascination with him that’s quite distinct from the dumbed-down Hitler-hatred churned out by the Hollywood Nazi factory. I was intrigued by the figure of George Steiner, a Viennese Jew and Cambridge professor (by way of Paris and New York), because he was advisor to one of my favorite writers, Geoffrey Wolff, when the latter was doing graduate work at Cambridge in the 1960s. It was there that Steiner informed Wolff, for what was apparently the first time in his life, that he (Wolff) was a Jew.[5] But Steiner remains for me an impenetrable and unlikable figure. Bowden strains to convince us that this drama is odd but marvelous, structured like a Greek tragedy culminating in a very long speech by A. H.

Much more congenial to the Bowden critical eye and ear is his talk on Edward Elgar — it’s called simply “Edward Elgar” — that supremely English composer whom we know mostly through his early twentieth-century Pomp and Circumstance marches (the first one, with lyrics, is also known as “Land of Hope and Glory”), as well as orchestral arrangements for such favorites as “Rule Britannia.” English music was long belittled by Continental musicologists, partly because the effects of Puritanism and the Cromwell years wiped out any continuity of native musical tradition.

But this music that is Elgar’s — which is, racially speaking, a combination of Germanic and Celtic strands musically, within one particular personality — creates a feeling that English people respond to with deep sonorousness in joy and sadness.

Two of the long essays — or talks — in this collection are real standouts, extensive sociological analyses that could be published on their own as monographs, perhaps expanded to several times their length, if Mr. Bowden were still alive to do it. One is “Lilith Before Eve,” which could be described as a critique of feminism over the past half-century or so, only that’s too reductionist. It’s really a critique of a Soviet-style proletarianization of Western society (Bowden of course is thinking mostly of England) due to the twin phenomena of acceptance of widespread porn in the public sphere, and mass truckling to­ Leftist feminism in all areas of politics and society. Sometimes the two forces are at war with each other. He describes a newsagent’s near the University of Manchester where the porn mags you’d see staring you down when you entered a W. H. Smith’s anywhere else, are here nowhere in sight. It’s because the Bolshevism of the local university and feminist culture have managed to ban any publication that might conceivably be offensive (which is to say: sexist, humorous, reactionary) to absolutely anyone at all who might stroll in off the pavement.

The other essay is “The Soviet Gulag,” another 10,000-word monstrosity, an excellent and deep dive into the origins and effects of the Gulag system from the time of the Bolshevik Revolution until the fall of the Soviet Union. Often misunderstood as a specifically Stalinist aberration, the Gulag and terror system was present from the beginning:

[T]he Bolshevik Revolution was not a social revolution. It was a coup. It was a coup d’etat by the armed wing of the Bolshevik Party that had 9, 10, 11, 12% of the vote, but not any more at that time after the first Duma elections, which had put in a socialist revolutionary, a social democrat in Western terms, called Kerensky. Now, when the Bolsheviks came in they immediately instituted a revolutionary committee for the protection of the state and revolution, which is known as the Cheka. The Cheka began the instrumentality of terror that certainly pre-dates Stalin. There is a Left-wing myth that essentially Stalin is the cause of all the problems, and that, in a sense, Lenin can be regarded as a semi-sacred, secular figure prior to Stalin’s overall rule.

Notes

[1] The Reading Room and its dais ceased to exist in the latter 1990s, when the British Museum hived off its library and offsite newspaper archives into a newly-formed British Library, now mainly housed near St. Pancras Station in north central London. But you can still glimpse it in film, e.g. in 1973’s The Day of the Jackal. It is where Edward Fox, as the hired assassin, goes to research bound newspapers about the recent doings of Charles De Gaulle.

[2] Colin Wilson, The Angry Years (London: Robson Books. 2007). Angus Wilson is sometimes portrayed as a sort of sponsor of Colin’s early career, but in Colin’s own telling Angus gets short shrift. Colin was annoyed at the wooden prose and naïve settings of Angus’s first novel, Hemlock and After. If anyone else was primarily responsible for the success of The Outsider, it was its publisher, Victor Gollancz.

[3] I’ve argued elsewhere that O’Brien of the Inner Party was partly modeled on Connolly, a prominent critic and book-review editor, as well as the author of a short black-comedy piece, “Year IX,” which is a veritable template for the thought police and torture in Nineteen Eighty-Four. I maintain that the O’Brien character was not supposed to end up as a brutal torturer but rather as a True Friend in Need, just as he appears to be when Winston Smith and Julia visit his flat. But Orwell was sick and ill for most of 1947-48, and had serious third-act problems with his novel, so instead of having O’Brien and Winston and Julia successfully fight and flee the system, the author made an about-face to a defeatist, nightmare ending, which he frankly believed — or so he told his publisher — to have ruined the whole story.

[4] For me, this is another clue that O’Brien was intended from the beginning to be a good guy, if a slightly clueless and impractical one. The plot arc of Nineteen Eighty-Four follows closely that of Keep the Aspidistra Flying, apart from the torture scenes, which were inspired by Cyril Connolly’s Year IX, as I say in the above note.

[5] This unwelcome revelation is related in Wolff’s The Duke of Deception (1979). Geoffrey Wolff and his writer brother Tobias (This Boy’s Life) were the children of an upper-middle-class Irish-Catholic daughter of a naval family in California, and a con-man Jew from Hartford, Connecticut who claimed — despite his supremely Semitic countenance — to be a White Anglo-Saxon Episcopalian who’d graduated from Yale and received a graduate degree in engineering from . . . the Sorbonne! Which imaginary credentials he used to gain jobs as an aeronautical engineer in the 1940s and ‘50s. When, at Cambridge, George Steiner informed Geoffrey Wolff matter-of-factly that he was a Jew, or at least a half-Jew — because Steiner could always tell — Wolff insisted that he couldn’t possibly be, inasmuch as his father was some kind of Yankee and his mother was Irish. It beggars belief that Steiner was telling Wolff things the latter hadn’t already known or long suspected.