Poets and Posers: Dilettantes and Dandies at the Barricades

Parody and Where Engels Fears to Tread

“One always apologises for writing parodies; it is a disreputable activity, ranking only a little higher on the scale of literary activity than plagiarism. A minimum demand is that what is parodied be widely successful—a tulip craze of some sort. This gives the parodist the luxury of feeling that he is doing useful work.” –  Donald Barthelme, Guilty Pleasures (1974)

Parody is an odd thing. You can’t parody a work you don’t, at least in part, admire. The best parodies often arise when one writer has mixed feelings about another and uses parody to sort them out. Yet serious people can be curiously sniffy about parody.

Before we had texts to interrogate, we had literary works to be elucidated by the great and the good, among whom –  for much of the twentieth century – was the formidable F. R. Leavis of Cambridge. He disapproved of parody as he did of most unserious things.

Leavis and the Stigma of Parody

Leavis disliked parody on principle. In a letter to The Spectator, he thundered:

“The cult of parody … belongs to that literary culture … which, in its obtuse and smug complacency, is always the worst enemy of creative genius and vital originality.”

To him, parody was derivative cleverness – art without authenticity, wit without vitality. He saw it as sterile and self-conscious –  “a branch of social civilisation,” his dismissive label for the corrosive realm of mass entertainment.

For Leavis, the parodist was a traitor, crossing the boundary between high and low culture. Parody was parasitic, decadent, and – worst of all – fun.

That’s me well told!

The Paradox of Parody

At its best, parody is a form of both affection and critique – a playful engagement that depends on understanding.

Satire aims to teach a moral lesson, parody delights in play by turning things inside-out and upsetting the apples in the tumbrils. To parody well, you have to get the original. When parody works it’s as a playful subversion – it’s as much appreciation as it is destruction..

Good parody depends on good material. It’s a kind of artistic recycling – transforming what already exists to show it from another angle, exposing its assumptions and absurdities. In that sense, parody renews tradition rather than betraying it.

There’s a democracy to parody too. It brings the lofty back to earth.

Critics like Leavis might sniff, but parodies often keep reputations alive long after solemn praise has faded. Who, for instance, would remember the minor poet Brian Howard if not for Evelyn Waugh’s novels and Cyril Connolly’s withering exposure of his pretensions in Where Engels Fears to Tread ?

You need some literary knowledge to get the jokes: if you don’t know The Waste Land, Wendy Cope’s brilliant limericks will pass you by; if you’ve never met the poets of the 1930s, Connolly’s parody won’t sting. You don’t have to know Pope, but if you can’t tell Engels from Oscar Wilde or Stalin, you’ll miss the fun entirely. But be brave – sally forth regardless. 

Cyril Connolly and His Targets

Cyril Connolly’s Where Engels Fears to Tread is both a  parody and a satire and one of the most effective and entertaining I’ve read. And the fact that I don’t “get” all the references is irrelevant. 

The subtitle, From Oscar to Stalin: A Progress, tells the story.

Written as a mock book review of a non-existent memoir by one “Christian de Clavering”, it offers a thinly disguised portrait of Brian Christian de Claiborne Howard (1905–1958) – minor poet, pre-eminent aesthete, gifted art hoaxer, drunk, and flamboyant Bright Young Thing of the interwar years. (Evelyn Waugh drew on Howard to great advantage in several of his satirical novels and  based Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited on him.)

Connolly’s target is the generation of writers who, after a decadent carefree decade of champagne and camp, reinvented themselves as communists and radicals. Along the way, he ridicules their poetry, politics, and posturing.

First published in Press Gang! Crazy World Chronicle (1937) and reprinted in The Condemned Playground (1944), it remains lethal. 

The Imaginary Memoir

The “memoir” traces its author’s progress from Mother to Eton and Oxford through London society and the Café Royal to his final incarnation as a Stalinist enforcer. Our decadent dandy discovers Marxism in the company of the fashionable poets of the 1930s – more by fashion and convenience than by conviction. 

It’s a send-up of the decade’s literary and social scene, when poets and poems turned to politics and pylons. 

Here are some of the vignettes of Christian de Clavering’s pilgrimage: 

Mother

“Mother, who is that horrible old obesity with the black chin? I believe he’s following us.”
“Hush, that’s Daddy.”
And so dawned my second birthday.

He was a precocious child and something of a prodigy.

Eton

At Eton, de Clavering lives a life of languid indolence and manipulation.

“The battle of Waterloo was being fought all round me, I just sat still and watched my eyelashes grow.”

He tweaks the masters and aligns himself with the bullies:

“What is that book, de Clavering?”
“ Les Chansons de Bilitis, sir.”
“And what is this lesson?”
“You have the advantage, sir.”
“What do you mean, boy?”
“Ah, sir, fair’s fair. I told you what my book was. You must tell me what’s your lesson.”
“Elementary geometry.”
“But it sounds fascinating! Then this delicious piece of celluloid nonsense is -I  know, sir, don’t tell me – a set-square?”
“I have been teaching it for twenty years and never met with such impertinence!”
 “Twenty years, and still at Elementary! Oh, sir, what a confession.”

 _________

The boys of course took up most of my time. I soon found that it was easy to get on with them by giving them presents, and making them laugh. A dozen of claret here, a humidor of Coronas there, a well-timed repartee, and persecution was made impossible. It was easy to find the butts and make rather more skilful fun of them than anybody else. In fact, I give this advice to those of my readers who are still at school. In every group there are boys whom it is the fashion to tease and bully; if you quickly spot them and join in, it will never occur to anyone to tease and bully you. … By cultivating all the Captains of Games in this way I found my afternoons were left free. I would watch them troop away with their shinpads to some mysterious district on the way to Slough, then saunter up to Windsor with a book – on the bridge I would wave to any who seemed to be pushing a particularly big boat underneath it. Happy river of Eton-Windsor I I have always been very vague about its name, but I often pictured it winding away past Reading Gaol and into the great world somewhere –  the world of the Ballet and the Sitwells, of Cocteau and the Café Royal.

Connolly captures the tone of narcissistic arrogance perfectly.

 _________

Oxford

Booted from Eton he finds his way to Oxford – to hosting parties and dispensing bon mots, favors, and advice:

I took care at these parties to have a word and a piece of advice for everyone.

There was an alert young man in a corner, looking rather shy. “I know – don’t tell me,” I said to him, “it’s your first party.” “Yes.” I pinched his cheek. “Si jeunesse savait!” I laughed. It was Evelyn Waugh.
Another merry little fellow asked me if I could suggest a hobby. “Architecture,” I gave in a flash. “Thank you.” It was John Betjeman.

Connolly skewers the lot of them – pretentious, bright, insecure, and desperate to be original.

But then he is sent down from Oxford –

My twenty-firster. Fifty people in fancy dress. The orchestra from the Grand Ecart …  As the college barge, which I had taken for the occasion, glided up the Cher, life’s goblet seemed full to brimming. But Nemesis pursued me. The dons descended. I suppose they hadn’t had enough invitations. It appears that those afternoons which I spent under some hot towels in Germers were full of goings-on, lectures, tutorials, Heaven knows what. Divinity seemed a prominent element in the City of Lost Causes. I went down.

But all is not lost:

 _________

London, at last. The ‘twenties. Parties. Parties Parties. 

And more name-dropping of everyone was was anyone in the literal and social world. And Christian de Clavering is at the center of the universe:

“But this is me,” I remember saying, holding up a slim volume. “Why haven’t I been told about this before, Dadie? Who is this T. S. Eliot?”
“He works in a bank, I believe.”
“Works in a bank – and writes The Waste Land? But he should be here, at my Tropical Party! Go and fetch him.”

And then the life of luxury is over. His father  bankrupt and the life excess is replaced by wandering around Europe. The poverty is crippling and he goes back to London to live with his mother.

 _________

Conversion

It was then that I saw the light. One day I wandered into a little book-shop near Red Lion Square. It was full of slim volumes by unfamiliar names who were Stephen, Wystan, Cecil, and Christopher? Madge? Bates? Dutt? These blunt monosyllables spoke a new kind of language to me. I looked at the books. Not at all bad, and some of these young poets, I realized, had even attended my university! One quatrain in particular haunted me. 

“M is for Marx  
and Movement of Masses
and Massing of Arses  
and Clashing of Classes”

It is his Road to Damascus moment. He is saved:

It was new. It was vigorous. It was real. It was chic!

And everyone was called by their Christian names! So cosy! From that moment I’ve never looked back. It’s been pylons all the way. Of course they didn’t want me, at first. The meetings behind the Geisha Cafe—they suspected me of all sorts of things, I’m afraid – I said quite frankly: “I realize I shall never understand eclectic materialism but I’m terribly terribly Left!” And I showed them one or two things I’d written for the weekly reviews, all among the waffle-receipts and the guest-house advertisements. And I called myself Cris Clay.

Radicalised, he joins a street protest:

Then – on a drizzling February morning – came my first Procession I It was for me a veritable Via Crucis, for we had to march up St. James’s Street – past Locks, and Lobbs, and Briggs, and Boodles. All my past was spread out before me. There weren’t very many of us, and it was difficult to cheer and shout our slogans

“One, two, three, four,
Pacifism means War.”

Commissar Clay Takes Names and the Right Side of History

The metamorphosis is complete. The aesthete has become an authoritarian zealot, notebook in hand, ready to purge the unbelievers. Lines are drawn, names taken, dissent is not to be tolerated. As our hero comes to the end of his story he has a warning for reviewers:  As a staunch anti-Fascist he is ready to use violence in the great struggle.

Reviewers Beware!  

And now for the reviewers. I think they’d better be careful. They’d better be very careful indeed. A line is being drawn. I’m going to say it again, and very slowly. A line is being drawn. Quite quietly at present- just a few names jotted down in a notebook – one or two with a question mark after them. They have another chance. And the rest don’t. Those lines mean something. Tatatat! Yes, my dears, bullets – real bullets, the kind of bullets they keep for reviewers who step across the party line. One day you’re going to see something rather hostile. It will make you feel, perhaps, a little uneasy. It’s heavy- and stubby- and rather pointed. Guess? Yes. A machine-gun. Pointed at you. And behind it, with his hand on the trigger, Comrade – no, Commissar – Cris Clay. Did you write such and such an article? Yes (No). It doesn’t matter which. Tatatat. It’s no good then bleating about how you voted in the last election, or where your sympathies have always been. We don’t want your sympathy. We don’t want you at all.

It is essential to follow the new orthodoxy. To read the right things and do the right things and believe the right things. No excuses. Guilt by association. Anyone who disagrees is a Fascist. 

You subscribed to the News-Chronicle, did you? I am afraid you will be under no necessity to renew that subscription.

You wrote for the New Statesman? What did you write about? “Gramophone records.”

“To sit on the fence is to be on the wrong side of it – line him up, Gollancz.”
“Yes, Commissar”

“It was no accident, Pryce-Jones, that you have lived near three royal palaces.”

Dissent is verboten.  You will be cancelled, and machine-gunned

There are two ways to review a book like mine, a right and a wrong. The wrong way is to find fault with it … And if I seem too clever it’s because you’re too stupid. Think it over. The right way is to praise it, and to quote from it in such a way that you can all learn my lesson. I stand no nonsense. Remember, my dears, a line is being drawn. Tatatat. See you at the Mass Observatory.

Our fully-fledged Stalinist thug has a particular warning for Fascist Connelly. 

There’s something all too familiar chilling,  and contemporary about all this!

 _________

In researching all of this I came across this lecture Middle Class Recruits to Communism in the 1930s by Prof. Nicholas Deakin CBE 

This is by no means a must watch, but if you happen to be interested in how the middle class in the Uk were drawn to communism between the wars you will find it interesting. Below is a montage of screenshots from the video. 
Needless to say, There are stories behind every one of those images:

Featured image: Pamphlet cover 1935, photo of Brian Howard by John Banting, and Cyril Connelly by Augustus John.