Nothing Here Now but the Recordings
Notes on the Shamanism of Bowden, Burroughs & Neville – Part 1  

2,373 words

“I’d heard his voice on the tape and it really put a hook in me. But I couldn’t connect up that voice with this man.”
-Capt. Willard on Col. Kurtz [1]

“Always superb, and getting better!”
– Jonathan Bowden’s habitual greeting.[2]

***

As a natural born cheapskate, I usually wait for a new book to show up on sale in the Amazon Kindle store, but as soon as I found out about Ed Dutton’s biography of Jonathan Bowden, I had it immediately downloaded and dived in.[3]

The redoubtable Miss Metroland has already given us a review here, and I call on her to summarize what life we have laid before us:

It is Edward Dutton’s thesis that Jonathan Bowden was and is (I mean, especially since his death) a truly charismatic figure, or “shaman,” as in the title. But he explains this by way of also telling us that Bowden was in many ways a crank, an unusually eccentric or unstable person, one with mental and behavioral problems and no visible means of support (apart from perhaps a small remittance doled out by his bank-manager father); and finally, someone who habitually lied about his background, education and personal life. A sad sack, alas; a real broken suitcase.

Along the way, he takes into account Bowden’s special attributes and pronounces him an undoubted, if highly erratic, genius. Bowden was possessed of great persuasive ability and penetrating insight when speaking to an audience.

There’s no Rosebud sled at the end, purporting to explain everything. We do however find out that Jonathan Bowden, who portrayed himself to acquaintances and colleagues as a stalwart family man—with wife and three, or five, or maybe even seven children—never married or fathered a child. He never learned to drive, nor even had a driver’s license, nor held a steady job with regular paycheck. He lived alone in a broken-down caravan, or mobile home, in a caravan park near Reading, England. He had no internet access there. He went to the library whenever he needed to do research. At one point he caused a scene at his library and was thereafter banned. He never graduated from any university or persisted at one for more than a term or two (although he did briefly matriculate in a college at Cambridge, where he proposed to read History).

Try as one might to be fair to the author, one can’t help but feel that Dutton, however authentic and deep his interest in Bowden and his ideas – the titular “life and mind” — may be, perceived the crying need for a Bowden bio before everyone who knew him shuffled off this mortal coil – given Alex Kurtagic’s dilatory delays [4] — and saw an opportunity to explore his real interests, such as evolutionary psychology, especially as applied to understanding the left and right.[5]

The result is something of a curate’s egg, with the biographical material larded over with great lashings of “studies say this” and “studies say that,” leaving the former – and the reader, or this reader at least – gasping for air. Your mileage, of course, may differ, but I could only make progress through the book by skipping page after page, pressing on to find the next biographical bits.[6]

Gradually, my sense of ennui began to clarify itself, and then it hit me: “You’ve seen these films! Haven’t you, my man?”

For indeed, my response had already been written and filmed, in what just happens to be what I think is the greatest scene ever to appear on a TV screen: here.

Yes, there we are, each of us: Don Draper, the great ad man/con man (Bowden); his rival, Pete Campbell, who has stumbled upon a cache of evidence of Draper’s perfidy (Dutton); and wise, avuncular Bert Cooper, well, that’s me, of course.

Cooper: Mr. Campbell, who cares?

Pete: What?

Cooper: Who cares?

Pete: Mr. Cooper, he’s a fraud and a liar. A criminal even.

Cooper: Even if this were true who cares? This country was built and run by men with worse stories than whatever you’re imagining here…. The Japanese have a saying. “A man is whatever room he is in,” and right now, Donald Draper is in this room. I assure you. There’s more profit in forgetting this. I’d put your energy into bringing in accounts.

The man in the upstairs room at the pub is Jonathan Bowden, the greatest orator of our time, not some sad sack of a modern-day Billy Liar.[7] There’s more profit in forgetting all that. We should put our energy into listening to him.

Moreover, one also can’t help but think that Dutton is playing a bit of a double game; if Bowden were blue-haired and tattooed, Dutton would use data to dub him a “spiteful mutant,” but since he likes Bowden, his eccentricities are the lovable pranks of a magical shaman. [8]

In the spirit of Wittgenstein, I suggest that we just cancel out the common denominator – all the “studies say” – as irrelevant and just deal with the end product: the man and his ideas.[9]

As someone interested in the sausage at the end of the process, as it were, in this case Bowden the exponent of certain ideas – as, indeed, as a shaman – my attitude to the production process is one of sovereign indifference, shading into actual boredom. If, as Bert Cooper also says, in another iconic scene, you need a strong stomach to see how the sausage is made, then I simply waive the opportunity to do so.

I realize some may feel otherwise; some in fact may feel exactly the opposite, fascinated by the production of such monsters yet indifferent to the results. Different strokes and all that.

And again, also in the spirit of “you’ve seen these films,” I began to recall similarities and differences – resonances, let’s say – with two of my favorite 20th century figures, from both the spiteful mutant and the shaman angles; the latter might be construed as a small olive branch to Dr. Dutton, as perhaps more substantiation of their correlation.

But first, let’s establish the shaman angle, and here the resonances and repetitions are already starting up, since I’ve already covered this right here at Counter-Currents, reviewing another book from Imperium Press, Bowden’s Why I am Not a Liberal, with an introduction by Michael Woodbridge, Bowden’s literary executor and hence one of Dutton’s prime sources.

In his introductory remembrance (titled a bit lugubriously “A Memorial”), Michael Woodbridge already gives us the proper angle from which to correlate Bowden’s biographical delinquencies with his rhetorical power: what gave Bowden that daring, dynamism, and bravado was the power of Imagination, which manifested itself in both his fantasy life and inspirational oratory:

Jonathan looked at his own tabula rasa as a completely clean slate, but, instead of allowing the chance happenings of the outside world to write his story, he would assume complete control. He would write his own fictitious story. Jonathan decided from an early age to write his own life story. That doesn’t mean that real things never happened to him, of course they did, but his creative imagination allowed him to recreate, reinvent himself. He recreated himself as the principal protagonist in his own novel.

Like Mycroft [Holmes, Sherlock’s brother], Jonathan existed largely through his own thoughts and imagination. The material world, apart from a sometimes hearty appetite, was almost extraneous to his life.

Note: “almost.” Mycroft, who Sherlock himself calls his mental superior, was hardly a “dreamy” character, but rather a consummate political insider, a mover and shaker, part of what we might call the Deep State and perhaps a forerunner of Ian Fleming’s M (just as Prof. Moriarty foreshadows Blofeld); he recognizes the importance of worldly action, and uses his powerful imagination to shape it to his will (as Crowley would later define “magick”). [10] Imagination is not opposed to what we naively call “the real world” or an escape from it, but rather is superior to it, and conscious mastery of Imagination is the key to improving our lot within it.

In the same way, Bowden’s imagination was not only the power behind what might, superficially, be considered the shoddy life of a serial confabulator, but was the power he sought to inspire in others, so as to give them the power to remake their own worlds; the Shaman speaks:

The decline is inside, and the decline is mental. Only when the mental processes change all the physical outside phenomena can naturally be reorganized. Not easily, it will be very difficult, but when the mentality is different everything else changes. What you see around you is the expression of the mentality, not the reverse . . . just by adopting a coherent form of thinking you can actually change reality quite a bit.

Imagination, then, is not only the root of Bowden’s shamanic rhetoric – the confabulations merely collateral damage — but the message to us as well. Bowden was not, as per Dutton, a sad sack who compensated for a failed life by creating a web of lies along with some powerful rhetoric, but rather someone who used the power of Imagination to try to better his life, and ours; in short, a shaman.

Notes

[1] Apocalypse Now (Coppola, 1979).

[2] Dutton, p.188. The use of Emile Coué’s famous mantra suggests Bowden had at least some secondhand acquaintance with New Thought, perhaps through British pop music. Mitch Horowitz writes: “The Beatles tried Coué’s method and apparently liked it, as references to Coué appear in some of their songs. In 1967, Paul McCartney used Coué’s mantra in the infectious chorus of Getting Better, ‘It’s getting better all the time…,’ and the lyrics paid further tribute to the healer: ‘You gave me the word, I finally heard / I’m doing the best that I can.’” John Lennon added the typically cynical chorus “Can’t get no worse,” but by 1980 he was quoting Coué’s formula in his song Beautiful Boy: “Before you go to sleep, say a little prayer: Every day, in every way, it’s getting better and better.” For more on Coué generally, see Horowitz’ “The Man Who Helped the Beatles Admit It’s Getting Better.”

[3] Shaman of the Radical Right: The Life and Mind of Jonathan Bowden; with a Foreword by Greg Johnson (Perth, W.A., Australia: Imperium Press, 2025); reviewed here.

[4] As Dutton described Kurtagic’s cockblocking antics, I was rather reminded of “L. S. Caton,” the literally fly by night publisher who stymies Jim Dixon’s efforts to publish the dreary article he needs to hold onto his tenuous academic position in Lucky Jim; Caton never appears, and is only known by hastily scrawled notes in green ink, until Dixon ultimately notices Caton has secretly translated the article into Italian and gotten himself a job in Buenos Aires.

[5] And again, one recalls Lucky Jim:

“‘I don’t mean anything, I’ve just been wondering what led you to take up this racket m the first place…You don’t seem to have any special interest in it, do you?’

“Dixon tried to laugh, ‘No, I don’t, do I? No, the reason why I’m a medievalist, as you call it, is that the medieval papers were a soft option in the Leicester course, so I specialised in them. Then when I applied for the job here, I naturally made a big point of that, because it looked better to seem interested in something specific. It’s why I got the job instead of that clever boy from Oxford who mucked himself up at the interview by chewing the fat about modern theories of interpretation. But I never guessed I’d be landed with all the medieval stuff and nothing but medieval stuff.’ He repressed a desire to smoke, having finished his five o’clock cigarette at a quarter past three.

“‘I see,’ Beesley said, sniffing. ‘I didn’t know that before.’”

[6] On the other hand, Dutton’s detailed accounts of various right-wing and conservative magazines and groupuscules is quite useful for those of us unfamiliar with the secret history of British politics, and if skipped would still repay a re-reading.

[7] In Keith Waterhouse’s novel (later a John Schlesinger film), “Billy Fisher lives in Yorkshire with his parents and grandmother. Billy wishes to get away from his stifling job and family life. To escape the boredom of his humdrum existence, he constantly daydreams and fantasizes, often picturing himself as the ruler and military hero of an imaginary country called Ambrosia. In his fantasies, he gives speeches to large crowds in a manner resembling Hitler or Mussolini. He makes up stories about himself and his family, causing him to be nicknamed “Billy Liar”. In reality, he lives in a working-class home with parents who constantly scold and nag him about his behaviour.” Wikipedia.

[8] Dutton cites “many studies” that “prove, on average and in comparison to conservatives,” that leftists are “objectively unpleasant, selfish, arrogant and entitled, treacherous, criminal, mentally unstable, congenitally physically unhealthy, physically weak, short, ugly, have objectively unattractive bodies, mutated, hateful, authoritarian, and dishonest people, and who, being frightened and mentally unstable, covertly attain status by pretending to care about equality but in fact are motivated by a desire for power and by resentment of that which represents the power they feel they lack.” I leave it to the reader of Dutton’s book to see how many of these boxes were ticked by Bowden as well.

[9] Having already called up Manhunter’s Will Graham to articulate my sense of déjà vu, let’s hear him, in the same scene, articulate the difference, albeit from the reverse angle:

Will Graham: This started from an abused kid, a battered infant . . . My heart bleeds for him, as a child. . .. At the same time, as an adult, he’s irredeemable. He butchers whole families to pursue trivial fantasies. As an adult, someone should blow the sick fuck out of his socks. [pause] Do you think that’s a contradiction, Jack? Does this kind of understanding make you uncomfortable?”

[10] I discuss Conan Doyle’s ability to create a character that has taken on its own albeit virtual life in “Sherlock Holmes, Superstar.” Woodbridge describes Mycroft as “a character who was virtually a disembodied brain having only a tentative connection with physical reality”; Zack Dundas, in the book I review there, describes one of the dozens of recreations of Holmes’ lair as “a fragment of a long-dead man’s imagination that somehow detached itself from his physical brain.”