The Masses
My sticky notes from The Intellectuals and The Masses by John Carey, a thought-provoking book for me as an escapee of the "mass" that is the English working class.
A hint at the left-wing sophisticate's central quandary:
Edith [Nesbit] and her husband Hubert Bland were both leading Fabians, and a friend once pointed out that as Socialists they ought to be in favour of cheap housing instead of deploring it. This criticism pinpointed the quandary in which the intellectuals were placed. They rightly saw that housing the masses caused irreparable damage, yet they could not ignore the social reasons that demanded it. ... "I cannot" [Forster] concludes, "equate the problem. It is a collision of loyalties."
On conversion as escape:
Roman Catholicism offered an attractive haven [from "soulless, godforsaken suburbia"], with its ancient tradition and Latin liturgy. By comparison with the Church of England, it seemed culturally pure. ... For refugees from mass culture, the Roman church was also winningly authoritarian and anti-democratic. Evelyn Waugh seems to frequently confuse Catholicism with distinction.
Aldous Huxley shortly after visiting the industrial Midlands and shortly before writing Brave New World:
The sad and humiliating conclusion is forced on one that the only thing to do is to flee and hide.
HG Wells on a trip to the shoppies (actually his protagonist on returning to London from Dr. Moreau's island):
weary pale workers go coughing by me, with tired eyes and eager paces, like wounded deer dripping blood ... Particularly nauseous were the blank, experssionless faces of people in trains and omnibuses; they seemed no more my fellow creatures than dead bodies would be.
Wells again (in the World of William Clissold):
Going to work is a misery and a tragedy for the great multitude of boys and girls who have to face it. Suddenly they see their lives plainly defined as limited and inferior. It is a humiliation so great that they cannot even express the hidden bitterness of their souls. But it is there. It betrays itself in derision. I do not believe that it would be possible for contemporary economic life to go on if it were not for the consolations of derision. I suppose nearly all servants and employed people find it necessary to ridicule their employers and directors. They find it necessary to divest these superiors of their superiority, give them undignified nicknames, detect their subtler frustrations, and then with a gasp of relief, ha, ha! life becomes tolerable again.
On Wells:
Freedom is what links Wells's science fiction fantasies with Mr his Mr Pollys, Kippses and Hoopdrivers. Science fiction is free because it transgresses the constraints of technology, turning natural laws to lawless ends. Mr Polly and Hoopdriver are free because Wells releases them, by romance, from their cramped lives.
On Arnold Bennett:
Bennett was capable of other attitudes to the suburbs, but he never fell for the simple intellectual sneer -- partly because he was sensitive to intellectual disparagement of the potteries and recognised anti-suburbans as tarred with the same brush. And so he sympathized with those who longed to escape from the suburbs and with those who longed to escape into them.
Another hint at the central quandary:
Bennett's is the dilemma of every intellectual who resents and renounces the exclusiveness of intellectuals, yet values literature too much to pretend that its lack does not maim.
Oof:
The tragedy of Mein Kampf is that it was not, in many respects, a deviant work, but one firmly rooted in European intellectual orthodoxy.