2,102 words
Jonathan Bowden
ed. Alex Kurtagić
Heat
London: The Palingenesis Project, 2017
Jonathan Bowden was Britain’s greatest orator. An autodidact who delved deeply into abstruse subjects, Bowden had a great affinity for those aspects of popular culture, religion, history, and philosophy that “impinge[d] on real matters” such as meaning and purpose.[1] He was uniquely gifted as a speaker who was able to articulate complex ideas to enraptured audiences. He had the power to transfix listeners with the power of his extemporaneous talks, which often ran for an hour or more.
In his lecture entitled “Western Civilization Bites Back,” Bowden said that he was a mediumistic speaker:
Well, I don’t really speak to a topic, but you need something to fasten your mind on when you’re engaged in a speech. Speeches are about energy, and are about power, and about how you utilize power and how you channel it. I’m what’s called a mediumistic speaker, so I hear the voice instant by instant before I speak, and when you stand up you hear what you’re going to say a fraction of a second before it comes out of your mouth. What I’d like to talk about is Western civilization and how we can save it.[2]
Although Heat does not generate the same sort of power when compared to his orations, it does nonetheless come across as a work that is being spoken to the reader by its author. It reads much like one of Bowden’s speeches as it ebbs and flows from subject to subject. Just like his talks, Heat is free-flowing and dynamic. The work’s main structural characteristic is its question-and-answer format. Bowden poses five questions and then answers them in detail.
You can buy Jonathan Bowden’s collection The Cultured Thug here.
In his editor’s note, Alex Kurtagić provides the context for Heat’s writing, its publication history, and his editorial approach to the Palingenesis 2017 edition. Based on some of its subject matter, Kurtagić was able to discern that Heat was penned during the summer of 1992.[3] It was originally part of Jonathan Bowden’s Collected Works: Volume 1, which was published by Avant-Gard Publishing in 1995. The Collected Works are comprised of 27 individual books written between 1979-1980 and 1993 and is divided into six volumes, edited by Jurgen Schwartz (one of Bowden’s pseudonyms). He had also used pseudonyms previously, including John Michael McCloughlin, an alias he used to review his own books.[4] In addition to the text proper, this edition of Heat includes a “Note on the Text” by the editor, a bibliography, a short filmography, and an index. Kurtagić provides explanatory footnotes throughout the work as well.
The questions that Bowden poses to himself in Heat prompt answers of varying lengths. Despite the book’s brevity, he covers an impressively wide range of subjects in his rhetorical responses. The first question that he poses is “What is the Democratic Right?”[5] According to the footnote provided by the editor, the “Democratic Right was a working name/transition group for what later became the Revolutionary Conservative Caucus. According to co-founder Stuart Millson, it only met a couple of times.”[6] In this section of the text, Bowden presents his vision for the short-lived group:
The whole purpose of the Democratic Right is to have an organization under the direct control of the most active people within its milieu. In essence, its raison d’être will be the revival of the entire right spectrum within the Conservative Party, an attempt to get this lethargic and socially complacent range of opinion to mobilise, to give it a bit of a kick, if not a kick-start. Moreover, the whole point of the Democratic Right is to have an organisation that is dedicated to inequality, hierarchy, order, mono-cultural identity, racial purity, and the resuscitation of a morally authoritarian Britain.[7]
It is interesting to note that although the group was ephemeral, this mission statement is an early articulation of ideas that would be reiterated by Bowden throughout his speaking and writing career. Similar sentiments were also expressed by him in his subsequent book, Right.
The fact that the organization did not last long would not have bothered him all that much. Bowden would later state, during his speech on Julius Evola given in June 2010, that what he was doing was less about organizations, parties, and groups and ultimately about the primacy of ideas:
I make things quite clear. I would be regarded by most people as a Nietzschean, and philosophically that’s the motivation I’ve always had since my beginning. That’s why parties don’t really mean that much to me, because ideas are eternal and ideas and values come back, but movements and the ways and forms that they take and expressions that they have come and go.[8]
Returning to the book at hand, Bowden then asks his second question: “When did your own political sensibility begin to mature?”[9] Bowden answers this query with an array of information. He begins with a statement about his early political involvement with the student wing of the Conservative and Unionist Party, the Federation of Conservative Students (FCS), in the early 1980s. Bowden makes the argument that the FCS adopted a libertarian ideological stance at that time in an attempt to be as Right-wing as possible without verging into unsanctioned territory:
In some respects, though, the doctrine of libertarianism was a deliberate pose. It was an attempt by the student wing of the Conservative party to be as right wing as possible without adopting a position that could be construed as ‘fascistic’. In a sense, it was a group of Tory students — all outrageously of the Right — who wished to avoid calumny, the prospect that the ‘f-word’ could be used against them. Indeed, this radical form of right-wing liberalism (if not neo-liberalism) was adopted in order to attack the post-consensus world, on the one hand and refute any acknowledgement of back-hand Powellism, on the other.[10]
Bowden then immediately transitions to an in-depth discussion of Jack Henry Abbott’s book In the Belly of the Beast, which consists of a series of letters to the novelist Norman Mailer. Abbott excoriated what he saw as a brutal and unjust prison system that “. . . was designed to destroy or humiliate his manhood.”[11] For the balance of his response, Bowden goes on, most notably, to discuss the films The Silence of the Lambs, Batman Returns, and Universal Soldier. He likewise explores the ideas of the Theater of Cruelty, a form of avant-garde theater developed by Antonin Artaud in his collection of essays The Theatre and Its Double. He also discusses Georges Bataille and his extreme Leftist group founded in 1936 called Contre-Attaque.[12]
The third question that Bowden poses in Heat is “What was your view of the John Casken piece at the Henry Wood Promenade concerts?”[13] This is a very specific question that elicits the shortest response in the book. Despite its succinctness, his answer is nevertheless significant as it is a nascent form of Bowden’s views about modernism’s potential to be a potent Right-wing form of creativity. He discusses John Casken’s piece entitled Still Mine and its lack of a coherent conceptualization:
Casken’s pieces, such as Still Mine (the one preformed on this occasion) and Orion over Farne, are relatively disjointed efforts, at once fresh brazen, and yet lacking an inner maturity of vision. In some strange way, they do not seem to work.[14]
What Bowden is hinting at here is his own vision for modernism, one that not only harnesses its visceral power but also articulates a radical Right-wing worldview. We will return to this momentarily.
That brings us to the book’s fourth question: “When you spoke earlier about the ‘irrationalism’ of the Right, particularly the radical Right, did you have ‘conspiracy theories’ in mind?”[15] This query generates a response that touches on the political career of John Tyndall (1934-2005), a politician of the radical Right and his “ceaseless adaptation of conspiracy theory.”[16]
Bowden goes on to write that the conspiracy theories of both the Left and Right are more interesting than how power is actually maintained in advanced capitalist states. Bowden writes that the true reasons are more mundane:
In fact, the reality is more boring, less interesting than the conspiracy theories that can be concocted around it. It basically reveals an elite that is made up of interchangeable parts deftly arranged, but primarily economic (industrial/fiscal) . . . The establishment itself, therefore, is open-ended (if ultimately finite), distended, co-optive, retentive, and adjustable, even permanent.[17]
He would express the idea of an interchangeable commercial elite later, and perhaps most powerfully, in September 2007 in his talk entitled “Credo: A Nietzschean Testament”:
A hundred years ago we had an elite. We actually had a government. We really haven’t had a government in this country, pretty much, for about 100 years. Not an elite that knows what it wants and understands its mission in life, and that will hand on to people after it, and that comes out of groups that exist before it. We’re ruled by essentially a commercial elite, not an intellectual elite or a military elite or even a political one, but a commercial, profit-and-loss one.[18]
Our author then goes on to discuss Modernist art, Classical Modernism, and the art and artists of the radical Right.[19] This section of Heat is reproduced at The Jonathan Bowden Archive as well. This is one of Bowden’s initial forays into what would later become Reactionary Modernism, his artistic credo. I would like to refer readers to the most definitive work on Bowden’s vision for a radical Right-wing artistry, Reactionary Modernism. I would also like to point to Nicolas R. Jeelvy’s excellent review of the book.[20]
You can buy Jonathan Bowden’s Western Civilization Bites Back here.
“Are you going to talk any more about the Far Right?” is Heat’s fifth and final question.[21] Bowden hereafter takes readers through a discussion that encompasses a whole litany of individuals and organizations on the Left and the Right, including, for example, The League of Empire Loyalists, Douglas Hurd, Jeremy Thorpe, Ian Douglas Smith, the Red Army Faction (also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang), the Angry Brigade, the Animal Liberation Front, Sir Oswald Mosley, Norman Tebbit, Combat 18, the British Movement, Redwatch, and many others.[22]
While I am loath to criticize any instance where Bowden’s works have been preserved for the “enjoyment of future readers,” there are still a few minor criticisms that need to be leveled at this edition. Although Kurtagić at the outset stated that his editorial approach was characterized by a light hand, typos still remain. That is, however, understandable given that, as James J. O’Meara indicated in his review of Bowden’s book Demon, the original version of The Collected Works was “something of a self-published mess.” And for all of Bowden’s undisputed genius, he was not one for documentation or footnotes of his own. Meticulous documentation or substantiation of his points in the text was not something that concerned him, and he did make occasional errors, a point duly noted by the editor. Moreover, it would have been beneficial for the reader if some of the monstrously long paragraphs in the book were broken up. As with other Palingenesis Project titles authored by Bowden, they are increasingly difficult to find given that the publisher has taken them out of print.
In spite of these minor criticisms, Heat, along with versions of Bowden’s other works, whether they have been preserved in print or online, are invaluable. They document the prodigious number of movies, works of music, books, organizations, thinkers, and ideas that preoccupied Bowden at certain times in his life. Hopefully future editions of Bowden’s books will be produced in order that researchers and aspiring cultured thugs may follow in his footsteps.
Reading a book by Jonathan Bowden is like watching a modernist freight train, complete with rolling stock and crammed with strange yet invaluable cargo, rush past a station. You get memorable glimpses of the fascinating stuff as it speeds by at a dizzying pace: Maybe there’s a Lovecraftian tentacle flailing dangerously in the wind, and perhaps a vivid but vicious painting fell off the back. Before you know it, though, the spectacle is over — and you’re left bewildered, but wanting to learn more.
Notes
[1] See also Jonathan Bowden, “Credo: A Nietzschean Testament,” in Western Civilization Bites Back, ed. Greg Johnson (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2014), 83-104.
[2] Jonathan Bowden, “Western Civilization Bites Back,” in Western Civilization Bites Back, ed. Greg Johnson (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2014), 1-29.
[3] Jonathan Bowden, Heat (London: The Palingenesis Project, 2017), x.
[4] Heat, vii.
[5] Heat, 1.
[6] Heat, 1.
[7] Heat, 2.
[8] See also Jonathan Bowden, “Julius Evola: The World’s Most Right-Wing Thinker,” in Extremists: Studies in Metapolitics, ed. Greg Johnson (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2017), 130-157.
[9] Heat, 5.
[10] Heat, 6.
[11] Heat, 7.
[12] Heat, 9-24.
[13] Heat, 24.
[14] Heat, 25.
[15] Heat, 26.
[16] Heat, 26.
[17] Heat, 27-28.
[18] “Credo: A Nietzschean Testament,” in Western Civilization Bites Back, 83-84.
[19] Heat, 39-43.
[20] Jonathan Bowden, Reactionary Modernism, ed. Greg Johnson (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2022).
[21] Heat, 44.
[22] Heat, 44-71.