Novalis.

Novalis and Philo-Sophie
Works now being published in English reveal the key role Novalis played in German culture
Jeremy Adler

The success of the French Encyclopédie and its place in the Enlightenment has tended to obscure the role of encyclopaedism in German culture. Yet the ideal of universal knowledge has been a potent force in Germany, shaping the way the nation defined itself ever since the seventeenth century. Novalis played a key part in this debate, not least in seeking to redefine what he called “total science” – his name for encyclopaedism – as a means to achieve cultural renewal. Yet he was sentimentalized after his early death as the dreamy poet of the Blue Flower, and while this ensured his posthumous appeal, it resulted in the comparative neglect of his philosophy. His contribution to German idealism was only fully revealed, a century and a half after his death, by the editors of the critical edition of his works, a literary monument forty years in the making (reviewed in the TLS, October 13, 2000). The edition showed the full extent of the unpublished journals and notebooks, including hundreds of jottings and aphorisms, often circling round a plan for a Romantic encyclopaedia. The new image of Novalis, not unlike that of Coleridge brought about by the editing of his Notebooks, led to a wider revaluation, in which the Romantic dreamer has given way to the incisive philosopher. Now, two centuries after his death, the new material is at long last becoming available in English in versions beginning with Margaret Mahony Stoljar’s Philosophical Writings (1997) and Jane Kneller’s Fichte Studies (2003), and continuing with the volumes under review.

The new Novalis more than confirms Thomas Carlyle’s view of him as “the German Pascal”. Both men had practical talents, yet they both evinced a radical purity that drove them to treat the infinite as the only measure, and hence to redefine the thinking of the age; moreover, they both pursued a trajectory from mathematics to theology and did so with such intensity that their precocious beginnings could perhaps only be fulfilled in an equally premature death; while the search for a higher, absolute truth ended in fragmentary utterance. Yet if Pascal’s Pensées were the anguished conscience of the neoclassical age, Novalis’s Fragmente were rather the electrifying consciousness of modernity.

With Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis regarded Germany’s task in modern Europe as a dialectical reversal of the French Revolution: the reflective German Geist should respond to and transcend the materialistic excesses of the Terror. Novalis’s speech “Christendom or Europe” (1799), though on Goethe’s advice excluded from the founding journal of German Romanticism, the Athenaeum, constitutes the most potent political manifesto of the first Romantic school. At its core lies an encyclopaedic vision of European diversity that goes back to the Middle Ages, when the opposing states were spiritually united under Catholic hegemony, a period Novalis treats as a golden age. The German tradition from Kant and Lessing to Goethe and Schiller regarded enlightenment as the means for humanity to prevail over strife, and Novalis explicitly invites the enlightened “encyclopaedists” to participate in the movement towards not just a German revival, but a new, spiritually self-aware Europe.

The ultimate reliance of the political visionary on the mystical poet of the Blue Flower is evident in later poems such as the Hymns to the Night and in “Wenn nicht mehr Zahlen und Figuren . . .”. The latter, as Ludwig Tieck recognized, distils Novalis’s belief into its most limpid form:

When no longer numbers and figures
Are the keys to all God’s creatures,
When those who sing or kiss
Know more than the greatest wits,
When the world is given back to life
And frees itself from earthly strife,
When light and shade in unity
Create a higher clarity,
And people see world-history
In fairy tales and poetry,
Then all confusion will fly away
At a single secret word.

This is the doctrine of a world history founded on inwardness that the late Penelope Fitzgerald so admired. In an essay on Yeats, she rehearses the credo almost verbatim: “the world will not be right till poetry is pronounced to be life itself, our own lives but shadows and poor imitations”. The Birth of Novalis, edited by Bruce Donehower, the title of which recalls the outworn image, actually dismantles the Novalis legend. This invaluable biographical collection concentrates on the engagement to Sophie von Kühn, from the poet’s meeting with the twelve-year-old to her excruciating death at just fifteen. It includes letters by Novalis, his brother Erasmus and Schlegel, and Sophie’s pathetic journal with its jottings such as “today was like yesterday nothing at all happened” – four days before her engagement to Novalis, which didn’t even rate an entry. The texts culminate in Novalis’s Journal of 1797, and conclude with the most important sources: the life by his brother Karl (1802), that by his mentor, August Cölestin Just (1805) and, still the best essay, that by Ludwig Tieck (1815). As Donehower aptly comments: “contrary to the stereotypical image of the otherworldly, solitary romantic”, Novalis is rarely alone. The diaries are filled with references to social events, to conversations, meals, walks, and so on. There are also some fairly frank notes on his sexual activity, what Novalis calls “the satisfaction of my fantastical desires”. Apart from occasional solecisms (“the father” for “father”, for example) the translation reads well.

Donehower follows recent scholarship in teasing out the poet’s changing identities, from the philosophy student, aspiring lawyer and gallant (“Fritz the flirt”), to Sophie’s admirer, her grief-stricken fiancé, the committed student at the Freiberg Mining Academy and the conscientious mining engineer. Sophie’s forbearance in her suffering became a cult – even Goethe visited her sickbed. She suffered three operations, but her liver tumour was incurable. Yet it was less the by all accounts remarkable living Sophie than the experience at her grave, the stimulus for the Hymns to the Night, which proved the defining factor in the poet’s life. The journal – as translated by Donehower – narrates:

"In the evening I went to Sophie. There I was indescribably joyful – lightning-like moments of enthusiasm – I blew the grave away from me like dust – centuries were as moments – her presence was palpable – I believed she would appear at any moment – "

Novalis anatomizes his unio mystica with Sophie in quasi-scientific detail, dissecting his actions and emotions to disclose the physical basis for the transcendental:

"As the mortal pain subsides, the spiritual sorrow grows stronger, along with a certain calm despair. The world becomes ever stranger – I feel increasing indifference towards the things around me and inside me. The brighter it gets around me and inside me – "

The narrative recalls the spiritual exercises practised by the Pietists to encourage the “inner light” to emerge. In following this goal, Novalis unites the mental with the affective sides of his personality to establish what he calls his “Philo-Sophie”. In his elevation of her into his ideal, Sophie becomes a mythical cult-figure, sharing aspects of the Virgin Mary and Christ, and personifying knowledge and wisdom. Human identity in general becomes a complex phenomenon for Novalis:

"A truly synthetic person is one who resembles many persons at once – a genius. Each person is the germinal point of an infinite genius. He is able to be divided into many persons, yet still remain one. The true analysis of person as such brings forth many persons – the person can only be individualized as persons, dissolution and dispersion. A person is a harmony – no admixture no movement – no substance such as “soul”. Spirit and person are one. (Energy is origin)"

It remained for Proust to realize Novalis’s starry dream, and to complete a novel as memory (“Er-Innerung”), a fiction that recreates the plural self by manifesting society as an inner cosmos.

Collectivism, on this Romantic view, was the social correlative of the plural self, and with Schlegel Novalis pursued what they called “symphilosophical” collaboration, a central axis of Jena Romanticism. The chief impetus for Novalis’s intellectual development, however, came from his encounter with Fichte at the University of Jena, and his breakthrough as a thinker is documented in the notebooks now known as the Fichte Studies. These form the philosophical counterpoint to his relations with Sophie. Jane Kneller’s translation of these is now followed by David W. Wood’s excellent version of the fragments from the next major phase in Novalis’s thought, generally known as The Universal Brouillon, to which Wood gives the more plausible and attractive title, Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia. It is to be hoped that this dextrous change will help establish the notebooks as a central text of early German Romanticism. Like other recent translators, Wood follows the historico-critical edition, and thereby confirms that the apparently intuitive thinker presented in the Athenaeum aphorisms (1798) was in fact a systematic seeker after truth. Wood’s volume also includes a short selection from the Freiberg Studies in Natural Science (1798–9). With its lucid introduction and notes, this essential volume enables the English-speaking reader to approach the Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia (1798–9) for the first time as a coherent text, part of a wider search in Germany for a new scientific method, a plan only later realized in modern physics. It should now take its rightful place alongside the “Oldest System-Programme of German Idealism” (1796) by Hegel, Hölderlin and Schelling, the first Romantic work to herald a poetically orientated physics; and Goethe’s exemplary fusion of science and poetry, On Morphology – which partly prompted, partly responded to the younger men’s theses. From anti-Newtonian musings such as these, the German scientific revolution associated with Planck, Einstein and Heisenberg was to draw a significant cultural inspiration.

Novalis called the philosophy of his Encyclopaedia “magical idealism”. Perhaps the nearest he came to explaining it was in a jotting of July 1798:

"To be an empiricist means to see thinking as conditioned by the influence of the outer world and things – empiricists are passive thinkers. Voltaire is a pure empiricist and so are many of the French philosophes . . . . the transcendental empiricists . . . make the transition to the dogmatists – from there to the visionaries – or transcendental dogmatists – then to Kant – from there to Fichte – and finally to magical idealism."

The magical idealist “wonderfully refracts the higher light”, and poetically transforms nature by “the magical, powerful faculty of thought”. This involves reinstating the Renaissance concept of the magus and applying it systematically to modern science.

On one occasion, Novalis also compares his project to a voyage of discovery:

"I have been on my journey of discovery, or on my pursuit, since I saw you last, and have chanced upon extremely promising coastlines – which perhaps circumscribe a new scientific continent. – This ocean is teeming with fledgeling islands.

The Athenaeum aphorisms, Blüthenstaub, only intimated the greater project:

"We are connected to every part of the universe, as with future and prehistory. It only depends on the direction and length of our concentration which relation we particularly wish to develop, which will become the most important for us, which will take effect. A true method of this procedure is probably nothing less than the long-sought art of invention; in fact it is probably more . . . ."

The newly translated notes go much further in exploring the new science Novalis calls “encylopaedistics”. The name for this “science of the sciences” may echo Diderot’s Encyclopédie, but Novalis seeks to outdo the French model by introducing dynamism to the idea of an Encyclopaedia, to study the “relationships – similarities – equalities – effects of the sciences on each other” to create “a scientific Bible”. His procedure instances the root meaning of the word “encyclo-paedia”, that is, a “circle of learning”. The approach entails turning scientific method on its head, as when Novalis claims to transform Bacon’s inductivism into a deductive method for “generating truths and ideas writ large – of generating inspired thoughts – of producing a living scientific organon”. As the Freiberg notebook records: “The combinatorial analysis of physics might be the indirect art of invention that was sought by Francis Bacon”.

The “circles” Novalis envisages in his “combinatorial analysis” are inspired by the medieval ars combinatoria, whose ideas retained an attraction for German thinkers down to Leibniz and Kant. The concentric wheels that Ramon Lull devised as a tool for inventing new ideas also serve Novalis as a model, and provide him with a motor for recombining existing ideas to create new ones. This method is, incidentally, related to the ones which the late Mary Douglas traces with such passion in Thinking in Circles (2007). As Novalis writes:

"There exists a sphere in which every proof is a circle – or an error – where nothing can be demonstrated – that is the sphere of the developed Golden Age. This and the polar sphere also harmonize. I realize the Golden Age – by developing the polar sphere. I am unconsciously in [the Golden Age], insofar as I am unconsciously in the polar sphere – and consciously, insofar as I am consciously in both."

The encyclopaedic Bible inducts the reader into the Golden Age: man returns to the prelapsarian state by rearranging the totality of all knowledge, thereby achieving a higher, paradisal consciousness. Man’s intellectual versatility reflects the universality of his creator. Yet the construct, like the self, remains unstable:

"Philosophy disengages everything – relativizes the universe – And like the Copernican system, eliminates the fixed points – creating a revolving system out of one at rest."

Novalis musters a dazzling array of disciplines to constitute his Romantic Encyclopaedia including mathematics, mineralogy, medicine, law, economics and music. Everything he touches he illuminates. Yet the totalizing aesthetic has its risks, both in precipitate insights, and in aspects of his theory of the State, understood as a “spiritual being” comparable to God. To combat absolutism, however, the Romantic Encyclopaedia looks for Kantian limitations: “Resolution of the main political problem . . . . Are combinations of opposed political elements possible a priori?”.

The philosophy of magical idealism led inevitably to the practice of literature. When Novalis abandoned the Romantic Encyclopaedia, it was to write the poetry it preaches, the “art of transforming everything into Sophie – or vice versa”. The Hymns to the Night brilliantly exemplify the turn: the poem’s success stems in no small part from the way it illumines the poet’s grief and mystically resolves his problems by an exegesis of world history. It is the first modern panoptic lyric, unmatched in visionary compass before Eliot’s Waste Land and Rilke’s Duino Elegies. In The Novices at Sais, his fragmentary Bildungsroman, Novalis develops the conceit of encyclopaedic circles to educate its main character, thereby also showing how world history advances by the combinatorial progress of humanity. The novel stems from an infatuation and later disappointment with Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. Goethe may not have approved, but he listened. In Wilhelm Meister’s Travels, he likewise favours the scientific path for his central character, and adapts Novalis’s method to represent the circles (“Kreise”) that compose society. In so doing, he replaces the abstract ars combinatoria used by Novalis with a sociological principle, more in tune with his own novel’s social theory, which offers a peaceful alternative to the route later proposed by Marx: a revaluation of labour, to remove the alienation that might lead to revolution, and a new respect for collectivism as a value.

For a fragile moment around 1800, then, there was a balance between individualism and collectivity in German culture, recalling the “Symphilosophie” envisaged by Schlegel: “Perhaps a whole new era will begin in the arts and sciences if Symphilosophie and Sympoesie become so general . . . that . . . complementary natures produce collective works”. Goethe paid homage to this ideal, when he called his Faust an “être collectif”. Novalis’s Romantic Encyclopaedia translates this joint activity to the political sphere, as in an entry on “Theory of a Nation. Pedagogy of a Nation”, concerning the interdependence of individual and collective. The protean method of his Romantic Encyclopaedia underpins much of his writing, where the disarming negations, reversals and pirouettes dissolve the rigidities of linear thought into a supple, lyrical dialectic. Thus Novalis the advocate of the State can also conclude: “In many places States should not be established at all . . .”. Such provocations retain a startling topicality.

Bruce Donehower, editor
THE BIRTH OF NOVALIS
Friedrich von Hardenberg’s Journal of 1797, with selected letters and documents
159pp. State University of New York Press. $25.
978 0 7914 6969 9

Novalis
NOTES FOR A ROMANTIC ENCYCLOPAEDIA
Das Allgemeine Brouillon
Translated, edited, and with an Introduction by David W. Wood
290pp. State University of New York Press. $35.
978 0 7914 6973 6


Jeremy Adler's translation of Hoelderlin's philosophical essays will be published next year.

Bill Hopkins.

Et interview med Bill Hopkins. Han har måske udgivet mere, men ikke meget, end romanen The Leap! (a.k.a. The Divine and the Decay). Jeg har over en længere, vel egentlig årrække læst bøger af 'the angry young men'. Der er en mærkelig problemstilling i dem, som interessere mig ret meget. Det her interview, skønt Bill Hopkins er lidt for lidt neurotisk, er interviewet et godt eksempel på problemstillingen. Han mangler lidt ængstelighed, lidt angst, der er lidt for meget afstand til det han selv er, til at han virkelig kan være en god repræsentant for dem. Til gengæld er han den yderkant jeg vidste der måtte findes. Indledningen til interviewet gengiver det ganske godt, der sker en omvendelse af det moralske problem. Problemet handler om hvordan vi kan blive skabende igen. Hopkins, siger at england var gået i stå, at der intet skete. For Hopkins er det hele problemet, og han er yderst direkte mht det, romanen, litteraturen skal skabe mænd som kan skabe og forandre. Direkteheden behøves, at skabelsen så ikke er direkte er en anden sag, men der er en ærlighed her som er totalt overset. Det er en forestilling jeg har, at der efter krigen, var et kort øjeblik hvor der fremkom en mærkelig form for ærlighed. Den var i virkeligheden på visse måder en fortsættelse af nazisternes ærlighed, for den handlede om handlekraft. Den handlede om at blive til, om at kunne skabe. Der var ikke noget accepteret, intet andet end en hvis form for virkelighed. Men man ville stadig skabe, man ville stadig gerne finde måder at blive til på, at tage sig retten. Den ene sti endte i marxisme og lign. I yderkanten af den finder vi terrorister. Folk som vil forandre, dvs. skabe, ved at destruere. Ambitionen er at se igennem det hele, penetrerende og det er en ærlighed, stadig, selvom den er blandet med meget meget lort og derfor ikke kan se ærlighed ud. Men der er ingen vej uden om, den er ærlighed for den handler om at handle, den handler om radikalitet, den handler om at være singulær. Der er noget rodløst hos en del af disse forfattere. Rodløshed er selvfølgelig et temmeligt brugt ord. Men det er godt her, for det er en direkte lukkethed, krigen er blevet lukket, den er blevet vundet og de andre er onde og hele spektrummet er et morads, for hvem skabte krigen, hvem har skylden. Nazisterne har skylden og dog er de ikke alene, det er hele tiden lige omkring os. Nå så fik jeg pladret.... nu kommer interviewet.


En ærlighed som var meget direkte, som fx trak litteraturens rolle tilbage til en plads, hvor den kunne starte med at finde sig selv. Det er den samme ærlighed der for Lindsay Anderson til at lave if...! De drømmende, surrelle scener i den film er ærligheden. Den er nød til også at være ren og brutal. Den er nød til at gøre opmærksom på en anden verden inden i den anden, den er nød til at acceptere den.



Hopkins An angry young man

by Jonathan Bowden

Bill Hopkins was born of theatrical parents in Cardiff in 1928. His father was the artiste and music hall star Ted Hopkins, while his mother attained recognition as a well-known society and artistic beauty. Her name was Violet Brodrick.

Hopkins was one of the ‘Angry Young Men’ group of writers who emerged in the 1950s. He was the most prominent of the ‘Outsiders’ trio amongst the ‘Angry Young Men’ - a groupuscule which consisted of himself, Colin Wilson and Stuart Holroyd. His most outstanding contribution was a succes de scandale with the novel, The Divine and the Decay, published by MacGibbon & Kee in 1957 - and his artistic credo, Ways Without a Precedent, contained in Declarations, the manifesto of the ‘Angry Young Men’. Doris Lessing, in the second volume of her literary autobiography, Walking in the Shade, says that Bill Hopkins revealed a great talent at this time. She also goes on to mistakenly declare that he died tragically young! His greatest achievement remains The Divine and the Decay.

The Leap! (a.k.a. The Divine and the Decay) is largely forgotten today - yet when it appeared in the late 1950s it produced an absolute furore in the press; a cause celebre which was almost unprecedented at the time. As an anonymous author, who wrote a foreword to the book’s de luxe second edition, put it: - “an abscess seemed to have been punctured in the general culture”. He goes on to say that anyone who wishes to analyse the nature of contemporary literary censorship - no longer about explicit mentions of sex (of erotica per se) but now primarily to do with ‘incorrect’ political thoughts - should spend a couple of hours in the Colindale Newspaper Library in North London (the country’s largest repository of ephemeral non-fiction) surveying the literary press’s response to this novel. The book is essentially a consideration of philosophical ideas. It deals with an ideological viewpoint, an aesthetic response to political reality, laid out in the form of a traditional narrative - i.e., a book with a beginning, middle and end. In a sense it is similar to a range of politicised fictions that occurred in the early 1950s across the Channel, such as Sartre’s Roads to Freedom trilogy and Camus’s existentialist tour de force, The Outsider. But the irony about this novel is that although it takes a relatively ‘traditional’ form it is, in actuality, a complete moral reversal of the left-existential works mentioned above.

In his anatomisation of the culture of the 1950s, The Angry Decade, Kenneth Allsop describes this work as both unregenerate and morally ‘evil’. He basically declares that it is a loathsome product which should have been banned - although, like all true liberals of his ilk, Allsop could not bring himself openly to advocate the censorship that he seeks for this book (somewhat inevitably). The work in question deals with the psychological origins of a dynamic leader (a veteran ‘Outsider’). It depicts the spiritual trajectory of a ‘British Caesar’ on his way to complete power - or what is conceived as such. If you like, it is a version of Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game played with human eyeballs! It denotes the ‘amoral’ power-curve of Peter Plowart - at least after he has succeeded in ‘murdering’ the chairman of the New Britain League: (the latter his vehicle to obtain supreme power): and furthermore, once he has successfully taken refuge on an almost deserted island called Vachau, which is depicted as a small outcrop off the Channel Islands. In actual fact this island does not exist; it is purely imaginary. It is merely used for the purposes of narrative-drive, even though it may be based on the Anglo-French outpost of the Barclay brothers, Brechou, a tiny isle off Sark. On his arrival in Vachau Plowart comes across various human types (or archetypes) against which he tests his will and his future view of the world. These correspondents - i.e., characters in a dramatic dialogue, all contained in the form of a novel - represent a Christian and ‘female’ perspective (Clermont); a weakened, male, humanist viewpoint (ultimately speaking) (Lumas); and the drunken sensualist, the man addicted to fleshey pleasures (Lachanell).

Plowart is a man obsessed by the nature of his own destiny, irrespective of all other things such as human warmth and comfort (for example). He is a perfect paradigm of the dictatorial urge (the ‘Will to Power’). Moreover he resembles a novelist’s version of the young Saddam Hussein (as it were) set in England around the middle of the century. (We should remember that Saddam Hussein had set upon his course at an early age. Indeed he first came to prominence, as a mere stripling of seventeen, when he tried to machine-gun the Premier of Iraq). Plowart is made of a similar human material. For he is a man who believes – in a purely Nietzschean sense – that the ‘Will to Power’ is the basis of all existence (whether civil or otherwise) and that human beings only learn anything through their ability to transgress thresholds of pain. In many respects Plowart appears in this theoretical novel to be a mediaeval figure, almost a mystic, a man who wishes to go beyond what presently exists: but always with a totally different morality to that of liberal-humanism (quiescent or otherwise). This is why Allsop - together with other journalists of similar views - reacted so violently against this novel: in that it completely contradicted their own beliefs, based as they were on soi-disant Enlightenment values. For, in all honesty, Plowart does not believe in the right to life, in humanist ethics, in opposition to slavery, in the belief that the weak are morally best, that women are superior to men, that sentimentality is a form of grace, that corporal punishment is wrong, that human beings are racially equal, that people do not wish to be dominated, that destruction is ‘evil’ (as a principle of life) and that human freedom is anything other than a conceit to be used by those of a higher power. In other words, Plowart is an ‘inhumanist’, an antihumanist - although not in a crude political sense. (Even this is not entirely true for Hopkins does not dwell on political matters straightforwardly - or in any other way - with the exception of a few vague phrases about the populist New Britain League). When we describe Hopkins’s character in this manner we mean - at least ethically speaking - that he is a mythical being who is closer to the spirit of Aleister Crowley than the contemporary Archbishop of Canterbury: at least as was depicted in Crowley’s novels such as The Moonchild and The Diary of a Drug Fiend. For Plowart is - in a purely normative manner - a ‘left-hand occultist’ or social magician: an ‘amoralist’ and an anti-Christian; a new Assyrian; a man who believes in a religion older than Christianity, when the latter is controversially dismissed as a humanist creed, the weak-kneed religion of those unfit for life. In spirit, however, this is closer to the Plato of The Laws - rather than the lucidity of The Republic. In any event, it is a ‘sadic’ faith (a doctrine beyond liberal-humanist and Christian morality) which sees war as the crucible of human meaning: and conflict/death as a state of ‘liberation’ in relation to preconceived notions of being. For Plowart preaches a ‘pessimistic’ ideology of force and challenge. He believes in the manipulation of mass emotion (i.e. the use of contemporary fear and sentiment) primarily through the persuasive utilisation of superior cultural energy. Basically, then, he stands for the values that animated European revolutionary regimes from the 1920s to the 1940s - i.e. the ‘dictatorships’ that were defeated by Britain and her Allies in the last war. Hence the fact that there was such a furious reaction to this novel - i.e. to a metapolitical enquiry; a philosophical speculation - undertaken in 1957, which was after all only a few years after the war itself had ended. But these events have now passed into history.

In this respect Colin Wilson misunderstands the book in his otherwise interesting introduction to the novel’s second edition in the 1980s - particularly when he speaks of it as a mystical travelogue. For, in actuality, this novel is an exercise in psycho-history before it has been written. It is a fusion of Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out (its Sabbatesque revelations) with an imaginary autobiography - an auto-hagiography, even - of the young Enoch Powell.

In this sense Bill Hopkins’s The Divine and the Decay - his greatest literary achievement - stands revealed as a Bildungsroman of the anti-Left; a premonitory explosion; a lightening-flash which reveals a terra incognita; an intrusion into the Zeitgeist; a ‘storm of steel’ against liberal evasion. There follows an interview with the author of this incendiary novel.

JB: Were you an angry young man?

BH: Very much. I think everybody was very angry and frustrated during the 1950s and from the end of the war onwards actually. The whole country was in a state of stagnation, everything was pointless and meaningless. It was as though someone had stuck a vast syringe into the arm of the nation and all the energy had been withdrawn from it. We were all in limbo. The whole country had come to a standstill in a way that’s very difficult for people who weren’t born then to recall. The war seemed pointless to all of us. There was no feeling that ‘we’d triumphed over evil’ at all. The evil was that England was bankrupt, lost, directionless, purposeless. The wrong people occupied all the positions of influence. And the wrong people were masquerading as left-wingers, which I found just as objectionable.

JB: Can you talk more specifically about what you and your fellow ‘Angry Young Men’ were trying to achieve?

BH: Well, The Divine and the Decay mustn’t be seen as an ordinary novel. It was written as an inflammatory document to inspire and act as a catalyst, and for a while I thought it was going to. I certainly didn’t write it as a normal novel. I meant it almost as a manifesto.

JB: So you weren’t simply trying to change the view of literature but society in a political sense as well?

BH: I was trying to change the reason for literature, the role and the gravitas of literature, into something nobler than it was at that time. You must remember that literature in the 1950s was dominated by very dormant figures who belonged really to the 1930s: Spender, Auden, Isherwood, Eliot. All relatively effete, degenerate and hopeless voices. But also literature like that was totally disconnected from all the engines of society politically. It was very dilettante. Society was static, so the novel was intended to fuse literature to society and to change both literature and society into something much more dynamic than it was. I wanted Britain to become great again.

JB: Why?

BH: I thought - and still do - that the British are the greatest people in history exceeding even the Greeks and that Britain is the cradle of most of the miracles that make the world today. And can become so again. It’s a very, very strange, unique and peerless people and I’m very proud to be a member of it.

JB: Which writers did you admire?

BH: Above all others, Dostoievsky. Shaw very much. Wilde, in another sense entirely. H.G. Wells as a determinist and a scientist. Conrad, of course. Kipling very, very much; I identified with his empire-building, his imperialism and his respect for other races. Those are the great lights of my time.

JB: Reading the writers of the 1950s, there seems to be a great feeling of doom, a great urgency to change direction, discover a new politics, even a new religion. Was this a symptom of the times - a response, perhaps to the nuclear threat - or do you feel this remains the position today?

BH: I think it was very much a symptom of that time. I think the nuclear threat was ever-present, on everyone’s mind. Is it very different from to-day? The difference today from then was that today the endwarfment of the individual is more complete, the sense of impotence and insignificance is more total. At that time there was a great deal of feeling that the individual could become significant again if he could acquire heroic independence. That was the big difference. To-day people are much more vanquished. They’re borne along on the flood much more today than they were then. It seems a paradox but there was more hope then than there is to-day.

JB: It does seem a paradox.

BH: Well, computerisation and robotisation and everything else has taken man, through technology, to a further crossroads, I think, and it’s accelerating. And society is becoming much more global. Don’t forget that in the 1950s nationalism was a view that we had from our birth. Hence the wars. To-day I think you’d find it very difficult to start a war without a very elaborate rationale that would be acceptable to a majority.

JB: Do you think we’re moving away from nationalistic viewpoints?

BH: I think we are becoming more rootless and we don’t know our place in the world any more and that’s contributing to a feeling of impotence and insignificance. People haven’t the limited view that was part of the blindness of the 1950s. But it also gave them a passion about their own place of birth and upbringing and culture which is disappearing. They’re two different worlds, so different that it seems scarcely conceivable that they’re only separated by fifty years.

JB: You wrote in 1957 that a “writer’s duty is to urge forward society towards fuller responsibility, and that a writer must take upon himself the duties of the visionary, the evangelist, the social leader and the teacher in the absence of other candidates.” You wrote that a writer’s task is to discover the escape route to progress. Yet after The Divine and the Decay you ceased to write, or at least to publish.

BH: I don’t think the public realise the extent of censorship in a so-called democracy - which of course is mythical. There’s never been a democracy in the world and it’s still the only word we use. But a propos my own situation, when The Divine and the Decay came out, it was seen widely by the left-wing as one of the most dangerous things. Here was a right-wing thinker - right-wing in the sense of not being left-wing - who is speaking to millions and that’s very dangerous. Don’t forget we had platforms in every major newspaper, on a daily basis. They were all reporting us, The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Daily Express, The Daily Mail, you name it. So we were very dangerous in the sense that hitherto in society you kept radicals, left or right, on Speakers’ Corner and suddenly a group of wild young people were attempting to destabilise society; and in that sense it was very dangerous because it had never happened in literature before. There was no precedent for it. What went on behind the scenes was this. I was recruited to MacGibbon & Kee by Tom Maschler, who after he got me on contract departed for Jonathan Cape. I was left on at MacGibbon & Kee, which was owned by Howard Samuel, one of the Samuel brothers who owned great tracts of the West End. Howard Samuel, my publisher, was the left wing one, and he supported The New Statesman, The Nation and, even more militantly, the magazine Tribune. These journals were all set to work attacking me ferociously as one of the authors of their owner and with his consent. MacGibbon & Kee found me an enormous threat and hated the book but under contract they had to publish it. But they limited the publication. They didn’t sell the translation rights to any other country in the world, they limited the circulation and they pulped. I know that because I had many hundreds of letters coming to me from people going into bookshops and finding that they couldn’t get a copy of The Divine and the Decay, nor was it being supplied. I couldn’t prove it, but I knew it had been pulped which of course makes it so rare today. It should have been printed in a minimum of at least 20,000 copies, but it wasn’t. The truth emerged when I went into the publishers and asked why they weren’t printing more and I was told that they thoroughly disapproved of the book politically. They wouldn’t release me from contract so I could go to another publisher and they would make great difficulties about publishing any more of my work. So in one fell stroke, I was made a prisoner. Held on contract, I couldn’t offer my work to anyone else, otherwise I’d be pursued and they wouldn’t release me. They would neither publish another book nor release me. They kept me hostage; and that was the left wing who were going on so much about the dangers of fascism. They exercised the most vicious, nastiest form of censorship that I have ever come across.

JB: Presumably they don’t still hold you hostage?

BH: No. I’m free. I’ve got my book back.

JB: Why have you published nothing since, in the last 37 years?

BH: Because it’s time to go that one or two steps further. Plays, much more than novels, because my sort of novel simply doesn’t go today.

JB: Are you writing plays?

BH: Yes. I’m working on a quartet of plays for theatre which is nearly complete. I can’t say any more about that at the moment. But, yes.

JB: In your essay in Declarations in 1957, where you were talking about the writer’s viewpoint, you wrote: “I predict that within the next two or three decades we will see the end of pure rationalism as the foundation of our thinking.” Do you see any signs that this is happening?

BH: Very much so. This huge upsurge of interest in mysticism, in the psychic, in the occult are all symptoms of the fact that rationality as we know it - and I illustrated it with 1+2=3, which is a syllogism, a fallacy, it’s 1+1+1=3 - that rationality encloses a domain that’s a very small fragment of what’s emerging as a continent of new data, of unrealised worlds. DNA for instance is already taking us into fields beyond rationality and we’re trying to find the fingerprints of so many things which we’ve loosely in the past called genetic. We’ve got to create hypotheses where there is no rationality to govern those hypotheses and we’ve got to, from those leaps through hypotheses, establish bridgeheads into terra incognita and link back to the rational. Otherwise we can’t go as fast as we could if we were to leap beyond rationality. When we say irrationalism, that rings of certain echoes which are emotional and spiritual and so forth, which are quite dubious. But rationality at the moment isn’t enough and we’ve got to use everything we can to break through to further realms of thinking. That’s what I really meant there. I can encapsulate it in the sense that what we know isn’t enough. We’ve got to know more, therefore we’ve got to take enormous risks in terms of intellectual courage by throwing our minds into domains which could well be called insane. And art brut as its called, Outsider Art, is a perfect example.

JB: In The Divine and the Decay, the protagonist, Plowart, describes himself as the “greatest man of our time”, which I take in the sense of a Nietszchean superman or superhero, to whom normal rules don’t apply. But, following the analogy, if the ends justify the means - and Plowart commits murder in pursuit of his goal - how can we be sure that our actions will have the result that we intend? Doesn’t history rather show the opposite - that we know nothing of the future, that, as Shaw had it, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”?

BH: We can’t look back to history as a reference to show that something is necessarily so. You can do that in law through precedents but that’s as artificial an invention as mathematics. If the right people commit acts or take a course of action, it surely will be determined by them having a diagrammatic understanding of what the outcome of that or those actions will be. They’re not actions which are haphazard or should be - or would be, I think. So, the ends justify the means. Well, I don’t quite know why that’s ever been in doubt. We don’t quibble if that method is used by someone like Pasteur, experimenting on himself, or the Curies, but we do in terms of the Lenins, the Stalins, and the Hitlers. So I would say that under laboratory conditions we endorse that principle. Outside the laboratory we say the wide world is a very different place and humanism dictates that we draw back from any other cruelty than cruelty to oneself. But all the world operates on natural cruelty so that’s a wonderful example of hypocrisy. As soon as anything matters, it becomes a combat - love, business, snobbery; everything is a form of mental cruelty. So I would say that if one governs and understands all this and comes out with the final law that we should all live and let live, that’s insufficient. There will always be people hurt.

JB: Would you describe yourself as a humanist?

BH: I believe in humanity. But I believe that human beings have to be warriors.

JB: Why?

BH: We have to soldier on. We have to understand that life is not fair. It’s not equitable. It’s not something that everyone can be happy with and what we’ve got to do is think in terms of the advancement of the species, that above all else.

JB: In The Divine and the Decay, Plowart escapes from England to a small, socially incestuous island where magical or seemingly magical events occur. This echoes or anticipates some of the themes of John Fowles’s novel, The Magus. Was there something about Britain in the 1950s that made islands and events that, let us say, defied the prevailing orthodoxies of scientific materialism seem especially attractive to writers?

BH: I can’t answer for Fowles. But for my own part it gave me a hermetically enclosed, magnifying, echoing chamber, which was a metaphor for the world, really. All the putrid decaying people on it were reflections of that. How degenerate they were, how trivial they were, how unabsorbed they were over the prospects of humanity as a species. All these things were, to me, perfect examples of what I could portray as the world. I mean, here was a man who didn’t belong, who was the ‘Outsider’, who was en passant.

JB: Was there also, at the back of your mind, the idea that this might be a metaphor for the world after a nuclear holocaust?

BH: No. Because I’ve always had a great belief that the nuclear war wouldn’t happen. I don’t know of any species that has a literal death wish. Even the lemmings don’t.

JB: Do you, or did you, see yourself as an outsider?

BH: Yes, in many ways I did. And yet I was more of an insider than any of the ‘Angry Young Men’.

JB: When you speak of the ‘Angry Young Men’ which other writers come to mind?

BH: John Osborne, Lindsay Anderson. His film If has been very undervalued. Kingsley Amis, in the sense that he was very subversive and mocking. You couldn’t call him an angry young man but you couldn’t certainly call him a peaceful young man either. John Wain was doing the same thing, and John Braine - how to raise yourself up the ladder, the social ladder, which was unfair. They all felt that they’d been deprived of social advantages and they had decided that they wanted a society where everyone had equal advantages, which of course, came from left- wing thinking and I suppose radical liberal thinking too. And even I believe that everyone should have equal education, equal chances. So does Colin Wilson. But of course, we believe you invent yourself and the others did see themselves as maimed or damaged by the system. Who else? You want more names? Most of them are gone. Alexander Trocchi killed himself with a syringe. There were quite a few that fell by the wayside.

JB: So it would not be unreasonable to see the ‘Angry Young Men’ as almost a form of social protest, a protest by the non-privileged?

BH: Well, it was a protest by most of them, but Colin and I were really affirming rallying calls and a positive advance for society, we weren’t too interested in the bad things that you protest against. We were simply calling on people who had extra energy and vitality to break through to a further point. But not, you know, kicking other people as it were. If you’re a fast runner you really don’t have to worry too much about the people you say are hogging the racetrack. You just run faster and surpass them.

JB: Were there any concrete ways in which the ‘Angry Young Men’ were a group? Did you meet?

BH: Yes. We all knew each other and I think we were trying most of all to re-energise society. We were all protesting against dead thinking, for the need to become much more vital. That’s what the ‘Angry Young Men’ were really for. They were trying to break the stagnation of that decade and, in doing so, I think that they completely changed communication. I don’t think the pop movement or the pop world could have happened without us; or most of the other big social explosions. We were the thin end of the wedge.

JB: Do you see yourselves, with hindsight anyway, as precursors of the 1960s?

BH: Very much so. Very much so.

JB: John Lennon’s ‘working class hero’?

BH: Yes. In the way that we changed novels, plays, cinema, singing, acting. Yes. Undoubtedly. Historically we did. We were the catalyst and we paid a dear price for it.

JB: Can you amplify that?

BH: Well, you only have to look at the history of John Osborne and Colin Wilson and Lindsay Anderson to see the damage that was done. All his life, after the ‘Angry Young Men’, Lindsay Anderson was trying to get finance for further films and never really managed it. John Osborne was attacked more and more venomously with each play, so he never emerged as a playwright that people looked at as a playwright. He was always someone you hated and was a demon figure, wasn’t he? And Colin Wilson too. That changed his career.

JB: Do you feel that others reaped the rewards?

BH: Oh yes. They always do. And I think that’s good.

JB: The next literary generation, the Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie generation, weren’t trying to change society. They were writing in a way that one probably couldn’t have written in the 1950s without being regarded as a radical writer, but they certainly were not radical revolutionaries.

BH: Yes absolutely. They were accepted. Society had changed and they were accepted and I think in that sense the ‘Angry Young Men’ were very necessary as catalysts, don’t you? I think we served our purpose.

JB: You had an effect, certainly.

BH: In ant colonies they have soldier ants and they rush forward to any danger and they’re killed in their thousands but they’ve stopped the threat and they’ve changed the direction of the ant colony. So we were used, I suppose, as warrior ants by the Zeitgeist. And certainly I think that if everyone had known what was going to happen, and we didn’t, I think most of them wouldn’t have gone in to battle. I think it certainly accounts for the fact that today half the ‘Angry Young Men’ are dead. It put a tremendous stress on them all.

JB: Yes, it’s difficult to escape from such a very firm bracketing together. Perhaps no one really escaped from it. Perhaps Kingsley Amis?

BH: Yes, he kept his distance. But then he did pay a terrible price with alcoholism; and he did move much further to the Right and moved into the Garrick and made that into his enclosed world. There were effects. John Braine became from a left winger a Tory, didn’t he? And a Catholic and an alcoholic - and that killed him. All showed signs of stress. Except me. But I walked away owing to the fact that my way was totally blocked

JB: What did you do?

BH: I built an empire in antiques and antiquities. I built an empire and made a fortune.

JB: Do you regret the fact that your way was blocked?

BH: No. I don’t think that you can regret anything in life. I think you have to accept what is. Don’t forget, my father was my precursor. He was famous and he was rendered destitute and he ended up dead with everything in ruins. So I knew that there were consequences. From the very beginning I knew. In fact I warned Colin Wilson that he was about to be assassinated before Religion and the Rebel and Ritual in the Dark came out. It was all so predictable and my feeling was if no-one will examine my case, what had happened to me in terms of my publishers and what I was faced with and no one defended me - even people like Iris Murdoch - to hell with literature. I’m now going to look after Bill Hopkins and make him self-sufficient. I’m never going to be dependent on people again; publishers, a public that doesn’t notice what’s going on and accepts what’s being given to them. I felt very scornful about the whole situation!

JB: You mention Iris Murdoch. One very obvious element among the ‘Angry Young Men’ was that they were men. That was a line back to Nietszche with his Superman. There was also a line back to the idea of the outsider, started by Camus and developed by your friend Colin Wilson. It was a very male dominated literary and intellectual scene. Probably the greatest single intellectual change in the last 40 years has been the advent of feminism, the advance of feminine values and their effect on literature and the world of the intellect. Do you have any comment on that?

BH: Well, of course, that had already started very much in the 1950s and earlier, with Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, Simone de Beauvoir in Paris, The Second Sex.

JB: She was linked to Sartre.

BH: Yes, but she was a very independent woman. I mean, Sartre was attacking me as a fascist and Simone de Beauvoir’s lover, Nelson Algren, was a great champion of my book. So her lover, Nelson Algren, was championing me and her regular man, Sartre, was attacking me as a fascist and her position was independent. She was an alternative voice. Simone de Beauvoir certainly wasn’t in thraldom to Sartre intellectually at all. In fact I think that she felt sorry for him in many ways. She pitied him in many respects and that came out very much in that goodbye, that last account of Sartre’s dying.

JB: Nevertheless, at the end of The Divine and the Decay Plowart and Claremont are thrust into the sea and it’s the male who survives, seemingly miraculously yet not miraculously, through an effort of will.

BH: And imagination. And vision.

JB: And the female who perishes. The female who sacrifices herself.

BH: Yes. Well, of course, Claremont was occupying a very, very wrong position. She was defending what is instead of powers that could be.

JB: You wrote in Declarations of your disdain for “improbable love yarns closing upon chaste kisses” and the single sex scene in The Divine and the Decay presents sex as a perfunctory, loveless, almost utilitarian expression of carnal desire. Do you see sex as purely part of the instinct for survival?

BH: Yes. The drive to copulation is so basic to us all, it dominates everything. We mask it by words like love but the fact of the matter is that true love emasculates the drive to copulation. There is a perception of women as whores or goddesses. The goddess principle which has been propagated in all the advertisements in films and television emasculates men. They can’t believe that they can rip the knickers off Audrey Hepburn and mate. They have to adore; by adoring they invoke the contempt of the woman who certainly doesn’t want to be adored. All she sets out to do is to attract those who will penetrate her and impregnate. So women, by overdoing the show business attractiveness with cosmetics and lingerie and what not, often complain that they attract men that they don’t want. They want barbarians. Part of the motivation of the ‘Angry Young Men’ was their sex famine, their anger.

JB: Towards?

BH: The fact that they were sexually deprived. They all had the idea of blue stockings, of wonderful cool Lady Bretts – you know, of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises - Lady Bretts, who were cool sophisticated aristocrats. They would never drop their silken panties for them and that enraged them. I didn’t subscribe to that of course, because one knows it’s all show business. I never had any social anger nor sexual anger. I think, in that sense, when you said ‘Were you an outsider?’ I said ‘yes’, but also no; yes in the sense that society to me was full of such victims, needless victims, men and women, but no in the sense that I knew that there was no personal animus towards me and everyone was a ‘victim’ in their different ways. I mean old David Milford Haven, whom I knew well was a typical example, and David Astor, Jonathan Guinness - they were all ‘victims’. Everyone’s a victim in England. In America they’re not. In England if you’re not born with a title and with wealth, then you have an inferiority complex from the beginning. As soon as you’ve got a duke you’re inferior by definition. He’s a victim, despite being a duke, to the monarchy. The pyramid.

JB: Is this something you’d like to see changed?

BH: The monarchy is a victim of its succession. The whole thing always struck me as a kind of diddle and a doddle so I could never be passionate about any of that.

JB: Would you like to see the class system abolished?

BH: Very much, but I’m afraid it’s raised in people’s own minds. I’ll give you an example. John Braine, who wrote Room at the Top, was an absolute militant against the class system It was something that enraged him enormously and he wrote splenetic articles in The New Statesman about it. But when I took him to meet David Milford Haven, he found out of course about his title and that he was the Queen’s best man. All of a sudden a terrible quivering and a shaking of his teacup on the saucer revealed exactly the class system of this country.

JB: You’ve emphasised your Britishness, your belief in the superiority of the British race and stated that you’re very much a British writer. I would suggest however that you were the least British, the least parochial and most cosmopolitan of the ‘Angry Young Men’; the one most in tune with international ideas.

BH: It’s only possible to become international when you have such firm ground under you. I don’t mean physical ground. I mean history. When I use the word compost that’s about it. It’s all the mess, the blood, the gore and the entrails of centuries.

JB: There is a lot of ambivalence in your attitude towards England and Britain.

BH: I’m showing the flag. The Britain I’m talking about is here as it is for all true British men and women.

JB: Inside your head?

BH: Yes. And it shouts at the real Britain, ‘Grow up, be this and how dare you be tardy’. So it’s always been my attitude that I’ve told the English what they should do in poetry, in journalism, in novels and now in plays and that’s what I’ll die doing. I’m both parochial and international, but I can only be international when I’m sure of my identity. And I’m not interested in Bill Hopkins. I’m interested in another representative for the British people. That’s all. I’m part of the compost. D’you see what I mean? Nietszche: “Not me, not me, the wind that blows through me”. That’s entirely my attitude in life. And I can’t see any other way of living. We’ve been put on the earth as kind of Manchurian candidates and if society is hostile then we’ve got to be more deterministic and do battle. It’s forced on us. We certainly don’t crumple like victims. So that’s my arrival as one of the ‘Angry Young Men’ and I would have been saying this to you exactly in my twenties. Never changed. All I’ve done has been to improve my thinking and facilitate my survival materially and live. You know, there won’t be many of us left soon, Jonathan. There won’t be many of us left.

JB: You were instrumental, I understand, in the launch of Penthouse.

BH: Yes, well that was very important. As the editor of the first number, I recruited Bertrand Russell, Julian Huxley and many others who were considered to be heavyweights by the establishment to subscribe to a magazine that was showing pubic hair for the first time. And although I didn’t believe in sex as titillation, I did know that it was necessary as another battering ram.

JB: I think Penthouse can be seen as a battering ram, but also as something sleazy and unpleasant.

BH: It wasn’t sleazy. We used the most beautiful girls.

JB: Even hypocritical.

BH: It was an attack on hypocrisy! Penthouse penetrated to the foundations. Don’t forget the lavatory, the bedroom and the drawing room, traditionally in England, had been completely different worlds. Penthouse united them for the first time.

JB: We still see this hypocrisy about sex that Penthouse supposedly ended. It seems to be livelier than ever today, with politicians.

BH: Yes, but they’re all ending up at the Old Bailey. I mean, cheque book journalism has exposed the poor sods as they’ve never been exposed before.

JB: But the hypocrisy still has to be deep rooted to allow it to happen.

BH: Well, more and more it’s becoming the joke of the world isn’t it, really? Hilarious. But England has always been like that and Penthouse opened a lot of oubliettes that need to be opened up. I used to go to the Duchess of Westminster’s parties and people used to come up to me and say, ‘hey, you know, awful people, the press, always writing these lies’, and distancing themselves. What they didn’t realise is that I’d been on the news-desk taking their tips. If I’d really been an angry young man, I’d have written chapter and verse. I could have demolished most of them. They were all drawing money for feeding stories in about their friends. The magistrates were sending the prostitutes and the pimps and the perverts to prison and they were part of the active circle. There are a number of Englands, a number of Englands.

JB: What interests me and I think what interests you, is the hypocrisy.

BH: I’d go further, to pity.

JB: For whom?

BH: The hypocrites. ‘In sunshine and shadow.’

JB: You don’t seem angry at all.

BH: I never was. I’m passionate, but not angry. I’m passionate about the need for change. I’m passionate about the need for understanding. I’m passionate about the need for vision.

JB: Is there not a conflict between the views you’ve expressed and your own feelings?

BH: I look at it detachedly, as I do with everything. It seems to me that you can’t theorise about violence without being perfectly in tune with using violence yourself. And one of my ideals has always been based on the cultured thug: the Byronic.

JB: The Krays ?

BH: Yes. Well, you know the Krays were very, very respectful to me and anyone else in the Arts. So was Rachman, who was my landlord. I owed him rent for months and he didn’t care. All he wanted was to sit in on conversations of mine. I think you have to accept the fact that unless you can fight you mustn’t just take an ivory tower position. And that’s one of the things about Plowart which I was very keen on representing. I mean Isherwood and Auden and Spender and Eliot were all whimpering and whingeing about being so highly sensitive and I view that with total contempt.

JB: Yes. There is a very obvious contrast between the ‘Angry Young Men’ and the previous generation.

BH: Yes. Mind you, I did sympathise with them. But I knew that when the war came, it had to be logical that Auden and Isherwood fled to New York. It was absolutely logical. And that Spender was a pacifist and was in the fire brigade. They all identified with death and themselves dying, you know, it was the menace to narcissism.

JB: There’s the example of Firbank.

BH: Yes. And all the fin de siècle boys. I mean, what finished poor Oscar Wilde was that he didn’t even imagine a world like that in jail. The poor butterfly just found it so horrible that he never wrote another word after. And I certainly didn’t want that to happen to intellectuals and writers. I thought that we had to go through the abattoirs. It was a necessary process. So Plowart, The Divine and the Decay was really that sort of manifesto.

JB: Yet there’s this terrific irony that if Plowart really is going to survive, he’s going to survive because the hunchback has managed to save him. The man that he was trying to save from the ridicule of the other people on the island.

BH: Plowart believed. His contempt for other people was based on the fact that he thought that they could all change. They could all invent themselves anew. That was part of his cruelty, to expect them to be able to change. That they couldn’t, like Claremont, was beyond his comprehension. Because he’d changed himself. Why couldn’t they? And that was the reason that he’d taken the side of this awful man who was to later drop him the life-belt at the beginning of the novel.

JB: Do you think that he recognised the debt ?

BH: No. I think it was an affinity, as I remember, an affinity unrealised. I think one of the inspirations for me on that was Goethe’s Elective Affinities. You know this business when you go into a crowded room and there’s only one or two people you can even glance at and you know they’re relevant to you. All the rest are irrelevant and you’ve never been able to explain in a satisfactory sense why this is so; what this mental compass means. But you know it infallibly and you talk to these one or two and you leave, there’s nothing else there. I think it was the same with that fellow, dropping his lifebelt. He couldn’t be Plowart but he would be if he could.

JB: He was an ‘Outsider’?

BH: There are an enormous number of encodements in that novel. To me it’s still not a novel, it’s a Bildungsroman, a novel of ideas and it works on so many different levels.

JB: What do you think of the state of the novel today? Are there any contemporary writers you admire?

BH: No, because cowardice is endemic with people. And it takes a great deal to be able to create without and in spite of an audience. Unless you can do that the audience will never respect you. You have to have the authority to be able to take them through the labyrinth to magic. And today all literature is bound up with domesticity, what’s credible, what people can identify with from their own experiences, which are very limited. So the novel is largely extinct. It’s lost its magic. It’s become, in embroidery terms, petit point. And if that’s so then we’re looking at the demise of literature in the form of the novel. Unless it’s got magic, unless you can open the cover and be swept up into something that’s totally unpredictable, that leads you to an unknown point, there’s no point in reading.

JB: Have you read John Fowles’s miscegenatory novel The Magus?

BH: Yes. I was very struck by its ambitions and by its successes; but more, ultimately, by its failure. I regard it as a failure. But it was a very splendid failure. I think he re-worked it too much so he lost the spontaneity and the drive. He didn’t have the courage to do it in a whoosh, as I did, which he should have done. But then, we were doing it from different positions.

JB: He wrote The Collector in a ‘whoosh’.

BH: And that was a much more accomplished novel, although it didn’t have the breadth and the span of The Magus. I’m certainly not ashamed to be a fellow writer of his. Certainly not. I wouldn’t say that of Rushdie or Martin Amis, or Kingsley Amis or John Wain. Even John Osborne, for whom I feel enormous contempt, though I salute his courage.

JB: Why contempt?

BH: He was so full of bile and venom and blindness and smallness, pettiness, minginess, stinginess - all behind it all. A weird, weird mix to make a Fury. I don’t think I ever spoke to him before I fell into a position of patronising him, talking down, because he wouldn’t allow one to be an equal. I suppose you know that in one of his books he refers to me as an altar boy, do you?

JB: No.

BH: Yes. No, I think Fowles stands out. To him I would apply the word ‘noble’. He’s a noble man. And when he dies I shall certainly doff my cap.

JB: The greatest literary accomplishment in England since the war?

BH: No. I think The Divine and the Decay will be rated by posterity much higher and rightly. For a number of reasons. The attack was loftier. It did break the boundaries with much more of a crack than did The Magus. He was an obliquist in that novel, if I can refer to his strategy and practice and I was really an over-the-top attacker from the front. That’s what makes me unique, I think. Frankly it’s a Bildungsroman which the Chinese, the Russians, the Germans, all the intellectual nations recognise. I don’t think they’ll recognise The Magus. But an enormous achievement within the confines of our society’s hypocrisy.

JB: It’s very big in America.

BH: Yes, Anglo-Saxon. But he would never be big in Russia, or China, or with the Germans because they’re much more cerebral, really. So I think he would be more successful - he’d be respected much more in England than I would be. I think - it’s always final judgements, you never know - but the fact that mine is expanding out to the world right now, forty years later, despite all the handicaps it was given - being pulped and being restricted and being ridiculed and demonised and everything else. I think that’s very interesting, in the sense that most novels are almost certainly dead, however much their ideas are lauded within a smaller and smaller time span.

JB: I thought the only bad passage in The Divine and the Decay was the dream sequence on the boat, in the opening chapter. It made little sense.

BH: Well, I had to occupy that and in theatre in Elizabethan times they used the soliloquy. You know, speeches like “to be or not to be” are nothing more than how to cover a time lapse. Now, I couldn’t use a soliloquy so I had to use the device of a dream and use the irrationality of the dream; but what I had to do was to keep the readers with me through this interval as I was going forward. It was all calculated and that was one of the cards I had to spin and that was a losing card, I knew that. So, you’re absolutely right. If the circumstances had been different, if I had been writing in another century I would have done another thing and that’s all I can comment about that. We’re all bound in some ways to the conventions of our time and those are the death knells because if you’re dated that’s where you date. As Les Girls was dated by the girls wearing cloche hats in the 1920s, so you’re dated by such devices.

JB: It’s a novel that’s certainly dated less than most. I mean as long as French windows exist you won’t be seriously dated.

BH: I’m not sure, I’m not sure. You see, it’s a funny position I’m in. I met a chap the other day, Alan Deitweiler; he was the boyfriend, ‘gay’, of Alan Reynolds. Have you ever heard of him? He conducted great intellectual cells of writers in the 1950s and he picked them up everywhere. He gathered a big salon of all the promising young men. He invited me to his Christmas party and I was the only one really who rejected him. I went to one of his parties and I thought it was quack humanism. I showed my contempt and never showed up again; while Colin Wilson and Stuart Holroyd both kept going every Sunday to his place. And Alan Deitweiler, when I met him recently for the first time under other circumstances, said, “Oh yes, you’re the only one Alan Reynolds said would ever last to posterity of all the ‘Angry Young Men’.” And I was very astonished considering that I would have thought he would have hated me in return and rubbished me. And Alan Deitweiler wouldn’t lie so that astonished me too. So I think he was an arch-humanist, Alan Reynolds, very famous in intellectual circles of the 1950s. You probably don’t know him because I don’t think he published. He was just a personality. He’s dead now, but everyone knew of him in the 1950s.

JB: The book has a timeless quality.

BH: I think you’ll outlive me Jonathan, so you’ll see for yourself whether it will last. I don’t know.

JB: No-one ever knows.

BH: No, you never know, you never know. That’s the whole thing about literature, you cast a message in a bottle on the water. I’m not sure that I really care about posterity. One half of me because I think it’s whether we can reinvent ourselves as a people and re-inherit our momentum. The other half of me, cast in nostalgia, in the past, I happily join The Divine and the Decay to all that. I’m quite proud to belong to that and the ‘Angry Young Men’. It’s history isn’t it?

Lidt urettet filosofi om fremtiden.

fremtiden og filosofien.

Det vi beskæftiger os med er fremtiden. Dvs. sagt på en anden måde, hvordan vi kan virke i den og dermed i høj grad også hvordan vi virker i den. Dermed kan man sige, at det er en politisk tænkning, men den er hverken konservativ eller revolutinær, dvs. hverkende fokuserende på bevaring eller forandring. Her er det blot sagt, men den filosofiske tænkning der foregår her beskæftiger sig med filosofien som den der tilgår virkeligheden i alle dens afskygninger. I de formelle udformninger, kan den således ikke undsige sig nogle udsagn, den kan blot skabe distinktioner og forsøge at gengive og formulere de distinktive forskelle. Virkeligheden har altid været central for filosofien, eller skulle vi sige, det at blive virkelig, den har ikke udlukket den betingelse, at den virkelig har noget med virkeligheden at gøre, den har forsøgt at blive virkelig og ikke særlig meget af det som er blevet skrevet af filosfien har haft anden vision. Tekster skrives for at meddele noget, det kan være at meddelsen fodre en anden virkelighed end den der, måske endda ligefrem benægter den, men den forsøger ikke desto mindre at virke, at meddele eller benægte. På mange måder kan man sige, at filosofien i mange forskellige variantoner har forsøgt, at undgå dette filosofiske problem. Det har i højere grad handlet om at undgå, fejl, at undgå at kunne fælles af sine metafysiske forudsætninger. Det er som vi alle ved, altid allerede en umulighed, vi er altid allerede en del af verden, sproget, logikken (eller bid mit øre af). Filosofiens opgave er altså ikke at undgå metafysiske forudsætninger. Det er klart, at det har fortalt os en masse om 'forudsætninger', at metafysikkens betingelser er blevet undersøgt så grundigt. Men det har skjult og i mange tilfælde ligefrem undsagt filosofiens problemer med at blive virkelige. Virkeligheden kræver funktion, den kræver struktur, den kræver funktion. Disse problemer er ultra centrale og de peger i langt højere grad på filosofiske begreber som institution,

Men det er at virke i fremtiden som,
menneske
maskine
famillie
samfund
projekt
ting
natur
vi taler om, der er ikke en måde, der er en masse måder som virker i, muligheder som vi har. Der er en historie der handler om, at vi nogen gange får nye muligheder. Vi er ikke sikre på, at der virkelig er tale om paradigme skift, dvs. pludselige skift, men det lader bestemt til, at der er store forskelle mellem tidernes måde, at se og tale om deres verden på og det er vores påstand, at sådanne forskellige forhold, i høj grad gør vores muligheder i forhold til fremtiden, til noget der udvikler sig. Ikke mod noget bedre, ikke mod noget højere, men til nogle andre måder at opfatte verden på, ordne den og sætte den i tale. Om den verden bliver bedre er i høj grad op til os. Dermed er vi tilbage, for moralen starter her ved et ansvar over for fremtiden. Et ansvar er ikke en følelse, i hvert fald ikke kun, det er derimod en reel udført forpligtigelse over for verden. Hvis vi tager filosofien som eksempel igen, kan vi sige, at den har forsøgt, at afmontere dette ansvar. Dens forsøg var engang, at formulere et totalt system der forklarede det hele, finde et sikkert udgangspunkt, vores sikre udgangspunkt og derudfra, var forestillingen måske, at vi så kunne skabe en sikker verden. På sin vis forsvinder drømmen om en verden, især i det totale systems sidste udviklingstrin, nemlig videnskaben. Her er forestillingen om et fremtidigt samfund, en fremtid, som videnskaben er medskaber af, som den virker i, som den skal blive til i og bliver til i, næsten totalt fraværende. Det totale system forudsatte et eller andet sikkert, der rakte ud over de metafysiske forudsætninger, ontologiske betingelser. Det vigtige er her, at vi videnskaben kan se en forkastelse af ens egen virkning, den forudsættes, videnskaben fungere på sin måde, dens virkninger i resten af vores virkelighed tænkes ikke og den kan virkelig sagtens tænkes, tænk bare på, hvor diverse brugen af atom teknologi egentlig kan være, eller hvor meget forskeligt relativitetsteorien har ledt til. Filosofien mere generelt, har på mange forskellige måder forkastet forholdet til fremtiden, for det er en forkastelse af fremtiden. Videnskab er videnskab og sådan lades den være, den er dens egen verdens opfattelse, den siger sin egen sandhed. En af de måder som filosofien har forkastet fremtiden er ved i så høj grad, at fokusere på beskrivelse fremfor skabelse. Filosofien har ganske enkelt forsøgt, at dæmpe dens egne virkninger, gøre sig formel på alle mulige forskellige måder. Det er klare, at filosofien bliver til, den skrives, den læses og det er en fornægtelse at aktivt glemme det. Men problemet er ikke blot hvad den siger, men også hvad den gør. En af de måder filosofien har reduceret sig selv (dvs. afmonteret dens virkninger) er ved at forblive skrift. En skrift der cirkler om sig selv, som har sig selv som stof, materiale og først afledt resten af de måder som vi skaber, tænker, kategorisere, taler med og i osv. Dens ultimative reduktion, den hvormed den kan overkomme sine metafysiske problemer, er ganske enkelt ved, at se, at skriften ikke kan reduceres til sig selv. Filosofiens problem er ikke metafysikken, metafysikken kan overskrides af mange veje, demonteres på mange måder, men den fundamentalt formelle måde er ved, at lave noget andet. At lave noget andet er, at gøre noget andet end at skrive, det er at fører skriften ud af teksten. Måske er det et levn fra ideologigerne, at denne tænkning af hvordan teksten skal virke der har gjort, at vi ikke nåede længere, men blev ved med at lukke hullet til. Ideologierne slog fejl, ikke så meget fordi de var skrevet, men fordi de for det første indeholdte skriftens problem, at skriften kun er en handling og at hvad der tænkes der, ikke automatisk tænkes alle andre steder. Det er tekstens historiske problem, hvordan bliver den til, kan den optræde som en guide, kan folk læse den og have åbenbaringer der gennemgriber hele deres krop og sjæl og svaret er nej. Teksten virker på en andre måder, hvorfor undersøger vi ikke det. Denne undersøgelse ville automatisk fører til undersøgelser af forhold mellem tekst og 'projekt'. Dvs. man ville opstille situaitoner for tekster at virkei, man ville sætte dem i funktion, forsøge at få dem til at virke, gøre noget, stå i forhold til mennesker, ting, situationer osv. (og vi har på et helt andet niveua, nemlig i computeren og kybernetikken, en helt anden form for skriftens forhold, godt nok en helt andet skrift end den sproglige, men vores undersøgelser kan virkelig lærer noget her). Dermed har vi udvidet filosofien, den er ikke kun skrift, den kan ikke bare ikke reduceres dertil, den er den ikke kun. Men hvor er grænserne så for den? Det afsætter virkninger, filosofien er hvad der er brug for, den er det som virker og dette er virkelig meget og virkninger er ikke kun baseret på brutal, skøn eller nogen anden form for kræft, filosofien undersøger dem netop alle, har plads til dem.
Det er en klar forestilling som vi har, at computeren og dens tilhørende videnskaber kan give os brugbare redskaber og modeller i tænkningen af hvordan fremtiden kan ske. Funktionelle maskiner, der på den ene eller den anden måde udviser små-inteligent adfærd kan opfattes som nye måder at skrive verden på og dermed vender vi på en sær måde tilbage til filosofiens ambitioner, skriften skulle gøres virksom, den skulle skrive verden og skrives i verden. Det er det der sker her, godt nok sker det på små niveau, inden for systemteoriens decentrale, indre-ydre model og systemer overskrider ikke sig selv, de bliver ikke verdensherskere, med andre ord de kan ikke reducere alt til sig selv.




Et af de centrale problemer når vi taler om fremtiden er dens kontinuitet. Ordet dækker her over to forskellige retninger, der er sammenhænge der må bevares, gentages, følelser der må gennemføres. Så meget af vores liv hviler på tilvante forestillinger og vi kan ikke ændre det alt sammen på engang. Men kontinuiteten fortæller os også noget om hvordan vi kan arbejde. Den fortæller os om måder hvorpå vi kan producere virkelighed.
Det er vores interesse, en form for pragmatisk fremtid. Skønt de mere vilde ideer inden for transhumanisme og de videnskaber den bygger på er spændende og ved gud kan fortælle os meget, så er det ikke i første omgang det som interessere os. Istedet er det de nære forhold som vi forestiller os, at computeren og dens kumpaner kan hjælpe os med. På samfunds fronten forestiller vi os et langt bredere samarbejde med computere og maskiner, men også mellem mennesker via computere. I computeren er der mulighed for, at inkopere strukturer, samarbejds former fx, som ikke på samme måde er determineret, men virker i rummet, udspiller deres forhold. Ligeså kan man næsten sige, at visse computerprogrammer antager form af en teori, de er teoriens udtryk, men også den form hvormed den bliver bedst udtrykt. Det er skriftens sociale forhold til udvides. Skriften læses ikke kun, nu skriver den også, den fungere i den fysiske verden, den skrives ind i evolutionære processer og den skriver dem. Skriften er blevet funtionel. Den retning vi vil tage er, at en hel del ting omkring naturvidenskab, demokrati, formalitet osv. kan blive socialiseret, dvs. det kan komme ud og virke mere frit mellem hinanden, fremfor at være kun, at virke via bøger, via komplekse vokabularer (læg mærke til at vi ikke afløser, vi udvider).

Interessen for transhumanisme har et drej, den drejer i en hvis retning. Selvom vi kraftedme ikke søger det gode, så er det stadig udfra en hvis filosofi, en analyse af hvor vi står, hvad vi har brug for, at vi skriver. Transhumanisme er interesant, især fordi den ikke rigtig kan undgås, fordi den giver os det mest visionære, fantasifuld og dermed også (måske) mest gennemførte billed af hvilke forestillinger der ligger i hjertet af fx kognitiv videnskab. Det er utrolig klart, at det i hvert fald ikke er noget særlig godt opgør med videnskabens mekanistiske opfattelse og så alligevel, så sker det af bagvejen, det er som om videnskaben selv arbejder i en retning der overskrider de forhold. Sådan fremstilles det i hvert fald, fx af Ray Kurzweil. Det er totalt tåbeligt halvdelen af tiden, idet det taler med en påtaget frihed som om vi bare arbejder os derud.