A Study in Normality
Ms. HEPPENSTALL tells us that he has selected Mr. Middleton Murry for study because he is an _example of " excellent normality." By this he appears to mean that Mr. Murry is the typical twentieth-century man, not in the sense of being what most twentieth-century men are like, but in the sense of being what most twentieth-century men ought to be like and one day will be, if they pay attention to w hat Mr. Heppenstall has to say. " The whole- of Mr. Murry's *oil," we are told, " realizes attitudes at least potential to the vast majority of the human race." As time passes and the race develops, we may, then, expect' that these attitudes which are now latent will become explicit, so that we may all of us look forward to approximating in due course more and more closely to the norm which is Mr. Murry. This is an interesting and, to me, I must confess, a novel definition of progress.
I have spoken loosely of the race as a whole, but Mr. Heppenstall implies that the race is in fact rent by a new and unprecedented division, a division between intellectuals and the social mass.. The intellectuals have withdrawn from the mass and proceeded to address themselves exclusively to one another. As they cease " to have any valid function in society, the artist and the intellectual life in general take on continually more of the nature of racketeering," and there is an intriguing simile likening the intellectuals to the contents of a pie protected against the world by a hard outer crust, so that the more they jostle against each other, criticizing and reviling one another, the more do they in fact cohere among themselves. Since, then, there is this difference, this marked and ever-growing difference between the intellectuals and the race, of which is it, one wonders, that Mr. Murry is the " excellent norm," since he cannot, one would imagine, be the " norm " of both. The answer, it is obvious, is of the greatest importance to the intellectual reader. He must, however, restrain his impatience while he attends to another feature of contemporary intellectual life upon which Mr. Heppenstall greatly insists. The intellectuals are in a dilemma ; this Mr. Heppenstall shall state for himself.
" The Intelligentzia as a whole has seen the inevitability of Communism, and many intellectuals wish to help in its advent, understanding that to act counter to or apart from the immediate dominant rhythm is to make gestures of decadence. Yet, knowing that they themselves; as bourgeois culturals, are external to this act of history, they also know deeply that they do not want Communism."
The results of this dilemma are various and occasionally startling, including, " sleeping outside, on hills preferably," living " as if Communism were already here," " going in for vitamins and ultra violet rays " and " consoling the worker for his misery by an entelechal distortion of himself and leaving him more or less satisfied and quiescent." This last expression of the dilemma is apparently a peculiarity of the American groups of the New Masses, Left and Rebel Poets, who, "harried by the Marxian oracle at Kharkov" (?), " insist, by all the artistic means at their disposal, that every bourgeois is a swine, a degenerated and rickety swine too, and that every proletarian is, ipso facto, a receptacle for all the virtues, a magnificent animal and a clear-sighted deliberate revo- lutionary." The concept of the worker being " consoled for his misery " by a perusal of the works of the American groups of rebel poets is not easy to grasp. I find it, however, only slightly less difficult to envisage than the influence of Mr. Murry on " the Labour Movement as a whole," which, " remarkably wide . . . increases all the time." But if we are to accept the view that the thing round which " all the intellectuals ". impaled on their dilemma " revolve is the working classes," what becomes of the notion of the isolated intellectual, marooned in the juice of his own self-baked pie ?
Which is all very difficult ; in fact it is what philosophers call an antinomy. But this and many other antinomies find their solution in the person of Mr. Murry himself, who besides being an " excellent norm " is also a " great syn- thesizer." For the answer to the question raised above is 'apparently that Mr. Murry represents the tendencies, stirring no less in the heads of the intellectuals than in the hearts of the masses. The masses have power, but are Socialists only in embryo. The intellectuals, conscious Socialists, are without power. It is, then, Mr. blurry's political mission to dig a channel between the two. " inter- relating the needs and potencies of the intellectual world with those of the vast social masses."
Most of us are accustomed to think of Mr. Murry as an admirable literary critic—the books Fyodor Dostoievsky and Keats and Shakespeare are classics—and a writer of first-rate English prose. We know, too, that in his latter days he has written in an interesting and original way on mystical experiences which he believes himself to have enjoyed. But his appearance as "excellent norm," "political synthesizer " and the rest, is, to say the least of it, surprising.
The matter of Mr. Ileppenstall's book is, indeed, at times very surprising, and I am conscious that I have done less than justice to its strangeness. My excuse must be that I have felt it wrong to soil something which I so little compre- hended, but which seemed, nevertheless, in its incompre- hensibility to achieve a sort of perfection, with irrelevant and perhaps impertinent comment. The manner in which it is conveyed is, however, no less strange than the matter, and that the reader's judgement of the remarkable former may not be prejudiced by the inadequacies of the reviewer. I add a typical specimen of the no less remarkable latter. In fulfilling his role of " norm," Mr. Murry " perpetrates also the ultimate outrage on shoal ethics, on our schools or shoals themselves therefore, and, in the view which I myself hold and am urging, shows up in all its horridly contrasted bloodiness the pimply Discomfort from which our Intelligentzia is ever more nakedly suffering." Well,
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