Holy crank
Nicolas Walter
Edward Carpenter 1844-1929 Chushichi Tsuzuki (Cambridge University Press pp. 237, £15) If Edward Carpenter hadn't existed, he would have had to be invented, but it would have been a difficult job. This neglected rather than forgotten man, who died half a century ago, for half a century before that lived an extraordinary life as a sort of patron saint of the left or universal crank, or both, and it is still well worth reading what he wrote, if not what has been written about him, to relish one of the most eccentric and engaging figures in our culture and society and to reflect on what he has to say to us still.
Carpenter came from a distinguished naval family, but became a Cambridge don .and Anglican priest, and soon suffered a crisis of belief and identity of a kind which was typical in the 1870s but which went deeper than most, changing not just his opinions but his whole way of life. He lost faith both in his religion and in his class, left his fellowship and his ministry, worked for a time as a university extension lecturer in the north of England, and then settled down in a rural commune near Sheffield to live naturally, growing food and making sandals, and writing and speaking very widely from the 1880s to the 1920s. He became well knownas an agnostic with mystical and even occultist tendencies and a socialist with syndicalist and even anarchist sympathies, as the author of the Whitmanesque free verse of Towards Democracy and the socialist anthem England Arise! and also of a series of lectures and essays regularly collected in books defending almost every conceivable progressive cause.
Yet Carpenter wasn't really progressive, since he opposed most of what passes for progress. He argued that civilisation was a, disease, science a mistake, law a crime, and government a pity. He had idiosyncratic ideas about life and death, art and literature, in fact almost everything. He supported agricultural smallholdings and cooperative workshops against the nationalisation of the land or industry. He supported the rights of women and children, joining the suffragette movement and helping to found a free school. He advocated more sensible clothes, but would have preferred no clothes at all. He advocated clean air and animal rights almost before such things were heard of. He opposed the use of meat and alcohol, but didn't object to Psychedelic drugs. He opposed conscription, but didn't object to war enough for most of his comrades. He belonged to nearly every socialist organisation there was, and must have been the most utterly unsectarian member they ever had, always maintaining solidarity with revolutionary groupuscles together with support for reformist organisations and never getting involved or even interested in quarrels between parties and personalities, preferring to put the case for what he called 'larger socialism'.
Above all, Carpenter was a homosexual, and a very brave one. He repeatedly defended what he called 'homogenic love', described what he called 'the intermediate sex', and demanded what he called 'love's corning of age'. He publicly protested against the prosecution of Oscar Wilde and the suppression of Havelock Ellis's Sexual Inversion. He openly lived with several Young men, culminating in George Merrill, Who was his lover for 30 years until his death. Somehow he avoided serious trouble, suffering only occasional criticisms and one real crisis, when a political opponent abused him at meetings and in pamphlets in 1908-1909, and the only effect was that he lost his seat on the local village council. From outside, a picture of Carpenter looks less like a real portrait than a caricature Fornbining elements of every individual and idea in the British left of his day. Yet he was real enough, and not only attracted personal affection far and wide but exerted Political influence as well. He never tried to be more than the chairman of the local socialist society, yet Towards Democracy sold edition after edition and England Arise! was sung in all kinds of organisation on all londs of occasion right up to the 1960s. On h.is 80th birthday he received congratulations from the Labour Cabinet and the Trades Union Congress. After his death an International Memorial Fellowship lasted for more than 30 years, and when he could no longer be heard he was still being read. To get inside Carpenter, indeed, you must read what he wrote, for what has been written about him hasn't yet revealed the whole man. The early studies were too reticent and reverential, the later ones too tantalising and tendentious. Since the 1960s there have been doctoral theses and academic articles, and some useful accounts of his contributions to socialist propaganda or sexual politics. But what is needed is a full-scale biography, establishing him in his context and exploiting the huge collection of his papers in the Sheffield Public Library. Chushichi Tsuzuki is an academic historian who has already managed to write dull books on Karl Marx and his daughter Eleanor, and has now added the feat of doing the same for Edward Carpenter. A 15 pound life may give you all the !acts, and this one uses the material conscientiously enough, but it is out of its depth with Carpenter's character and out of touch with his environment. Tsuzuki is prone to misunderstandings even inside his subject, and outside it he makes far too many mistakes; his treatment of such topics as science, religion and anarchism is often ludicrous. Perhaps the real problem is that Carpenter projected himself not so much through his published work, though that is still penetrating enough, as through his personal life. Tsuzuki uses some of the letters in his enormous correspondence, and the quotation of one from a relation of mine reminds me of the way he was remembered by those who knew him. He was someone you didn't just read and listen to — you visited and talked to him; and this went far beyond mere political agreement or sexual affinity. Tsuzuki's subtitle calls him a 'prophet of human fellowship', and there was indeed an element of almost religious charisma. Tsuzuki documents the acknowledged direct influence on E. M. Forster and the alleged indirect influence on D. H. Lawrence, as well as the contacts with other writers such as Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, but his impact on the spirit of the age was much wider and deeper than this. There is an echo of the English Romantics and the American Transcendentalists, whom he admired so much, and even of his friend Tolstoy. Somehow the essence of Carpenter is missing from this biography, and must still be sought in his autobiography My Days And Dreams and other personal writings by his friends and himself, though it will be sad if it fades again when the current revival of interest subsides. A man who was at the same time so far ahead of and so far behind his own time belongs to every time, and if half of what he said sounds absurd now, the other half seems more urgent than ever.
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